Chapter 8. Avoiding the Black Hat Techniques

The term black hat SEO generally refers to any manner by which visibility, rankings, or traffic is improved through illicit or forbidden techniques, tools, or methods. There is a wide variety of techniques that fall under black hat: Spamming forums, spamming blog comment areas, automated link exchange schemes, browser hijacking, cloaking, link farms, keyword stuffing, article spinning, paid links, and many more. The goal of this chapter is to help you avoid these techniques and the websites that employ them.

The search engines push back against the black hat methods; they've gotten better and better at detecting and punishing illicit techniques. Generally, when black hat methods are discovered, Google ...

Get WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.