Black Hat SEO Tricks Never Stop

Temperatures and opinions run hot these days when folk start talking about different methods of SEO. Its no surprise seeing as featuring high in search engines these days is the difference between a business growing rich or a business failing! As a result the number of people getting into search engine marketing is exploding with mixed results in my opinion !!!

The tricks used by SEO practitioners to get web sites up the search engine rankings fall into three areas

1. White Hat SEO : Methods set out by the search engine companies as friendly rules to what is allowed to legitimately code and promote a website to be optimised for search engines.
2. Grey Hat : Methods invented by SEO's which fall outside of the literal rules set by search engines - to give added punch to the coding and promotion of a web site optimisation designed to improve the position in the SERPs. Without the clear breach of the rules !
3. Black Hat : Methods deliberately defying the rules set by search engines purely to gain unfair advantage in the web sites search results position. Such practices run a high risk of being identified by the search-engines and if caught - has severe penalties to the website in relation to any SERPs positioning !
   

In my early days of Search-Engine Optimization (SEO) back in the late 90's a little bit of searching around on Netscape, Google and Yahoo was all we needed to understand how to get our websites sitting proud at No.1 position within the SERPs.

Back then, Google used to count every click on its results pages and used to love the old Web Rings. In 1997 it took me under a week to learn how to create automated scripts which would trick Google into thinking that specific clicks were being made on certain web links listed in their Google Rankings Results. . Along with joining up on some good web rings and loading the Meta Keywords tag, even my designer friends were surprised that I'd keep winning bets between us for getting websites to the number one spot on sites like Google and Yahoo.

It didn't take Google and Yahoo too long to begin introducing more intelligence into their systems and reducing the ease in which Search Engine Optimizers (SEO's) could manipulate the search results of the big Search_Engine companies.
It's pretty much like a game of cat and mouse ! Google tries to display what it thinks is the most relevant websites for any given search - Whilst SEO's are tasked with trying to get their clients sites listed as the most relevant of sites.

Web sites need good SEO's. SEO's need search engines. Search engines need good web sites !

As competition for page one results intensifies, the pressure for creative thinking in the Grey Hat SEO arena increases. The less than capable practitioners make excuses for their inabilities to clients with smoke screens or simply opt for paying underground Black Hat systems to trick the search_engines for a time.

Recently Google announced that it has indexed over 1 Billion web sites, however I strongly believe that there's thousands of useless websites without true value to anybody except their owners who are trying to make money from confusing web surfers via click advertising campaigns. Worst still, many of these sites use ever-advancing Black Hat techniques to trick the Google etc to show their web sites in the first place. For instance I was checking out the in-links of a site today using Yahoo's brilliant Site Explorer and noticed a site called Spainz (dot co.uk) which has no value other than a strategic goal of raising a trickle feed of advertising cash and Page Rank for some select domains with converted use in the future!! This stuff is everywhere on the Internet nowadays, its cleverly created and promoted using sophisticated Black Hat SEO and just gets in the way of the legitimate use of the Internet.