SEO FAQ: Black Hat SEO Practices

For more information, see Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and Search Content Quality Guidelines from Yahoo!

Black-Hat SEO Practices may include but are not limited to: hidden texts or hidden links, cloaking or sneaky redirects, sending automated queries to Google or other search engines, loading pages with irrelevant keywords, creating multiple pages or domains with duplicate content, mirrored sites, malicious behavior such as phishing, including trojans or other badware (duh), keyword stuffing, too many links per page, and buying or selling links.

Ask questions or post comments about what practices to stay away from here.

Posted on Mon, May 31, 2010 by Christopher Nelson

9 comments (Add your own)

1. Veronica Schwartzman wrote:: Is there any way to find out if you have any hidden text or links on your site? Great ebook by the way.
Thu, August 5, 2010 @ 1:22 PM
2. Christopher Nelson wrote:: Hi Veronica, hopefully you'd know if you have hidden text or hidden links on your website already. However, I know that a lot of us are not web designers or web developers and we have to rely on others to build our websites for us to some extent. Also, if you got any amount of SEO done years back, this practice might have been (unwisely) used on your site.

The quickest way to check to see if there are hidden links or hidden text on your website is to right click somewhere on the page and then choose "select all". This will select all text on the web page you are currently viewing. Sometimes this works phenomenally, sometimes it doesn't. The real, fool-proof way to check would be to "view source" and go through the HTML on your site to see if there is any text or links you are not familiar with.

Thanks!
Thu, August 5, 2010 @ 1:25 PM
3. Veronica Schwartzman wrote:: How do I view the source?
Thu, August 5, 2010 @ 1:26 PM
4. Christopher Nelson wrote:: You can check the green menu to the right for a topic called "Viewing the Source" - I also talk about it more in my guide, Search Engine Optimization: Do It Yourself.

Good luck!
Thu, August 5, 2010 @ 1:27 PM
5. Jeffrey Nichols wrote:: I have a Javascript news scroller on the right side of all my pages. The overflow for the div container that contains the text is hidden with CSS. The function runs continually, and I don't know of a better way to build a Javascript news scroller (after all, the text has to go somewhere). Will having the container div's overflow set to hidden to achieve the news ticker effect count against me as far as SEO is concerned?
Thu, November 11, 2010 @ 7:49 PM
6. Christopher Nelson wrote:: If the text is all there and scrolls completely, you should be good to go. The ability to hide the overflow in CSS is a great way to fix your problem, and will in no way affect your SEO.
Fri, November 12, 2010 @ 1:03 AM
7. Web Design Montreal wrote:: Some of them hack a lot of websites to illegaly put a link in de coding of the site.
Wed, May 18, 2011 @ 1:14 PM
8. Daniel wrote:: Hey Christopher,
First of all thanks for the book! It's helped me figure out the process of Search Engine Optimization and now I am going to put my new found knowledge to use.
I had one question about the amount of links allowed on one page within a site. I know you said that Google conisders 100 links the maximum number of links that would naturally be included on a page. Would you happen to know if this number has changed since you have written your book? I just want to stay within the limits of Google, Bing, and Yahoo and stay off the list of Bad SEO practices.
Thanks,
Daniel
Mon, August 1, 2011 @ 5:12 PM
9. Christopher Nelson wrote:: I would definitely agree that anything close to and definitely anything over 100 links per page can and will get flagged by the search engines. I would try to stay as far away from that number as possible. Thanks for the comment!
Thu, August 4, 2011 @ 6:22 PM

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