There’s an interesting thread at SEO Refugee where the question of “Blackhat SEO” comes up. What is blackhat SEO and how can it affect your website?

Technically blackhat SEO is doing anything outside of the webmaster guidelines with the intent of manipulating the search engine rankings.

Blackhat SEO tends to bring in results faster than the normal “organic” process of whitehat SEO. It investigates exploits in the search engine algorithms to make a site perform better than average.

I think it is important to note that blackhat techniques are not illegal. Nor unethical. It’s just a short-term solution and there are appropriate uses for blackhat techniques. By short-term, I mean that a site using blackhat techniques will eventually get caught and when that happens the domain will be banned by the search engines.

A problem comes up when defining blackhat because a lot of blackhat techniques have legitimate uses. The problem is the search engines have difficulty detecting blackhat intent on a casual basis. And intent is the real indicator of whether a website is up to no good - and subject to ban - or not.

Common blackhat techniques include:

Hidden text and/or links - Or almost hidden. Use of CSS and matching colors shows the websites a site stuffed with links and content typical viewer won’t see.

Sneaky redirects - Use of javascript, meta refresh and other redirects where the viewer is supposed to arrive on one page but is instead redirected to another sales/ad ridden page.

Scraping - Generating original content based on targeted keywords takes real time and work. Blackhats usually want to keep this to a minimum so automated scripts pull content from existing websites. Advanced scripts scramble the content to make it appear unique.

Link spamming - Using automated scripts to plug links on blogs, forums and guestbooks. This isn’t as effective as it used to be because of the “nofollow” attribute and is the main reason behind Google’s nofollow solution.

Cloaking - Similar to hidden text but implemented in a completely different manner. Cloaking involves watching for the IP addresses of the search engines and displaying different content to them than to a normal viewer.

Keyword stuffing - An old school technique where the keyword density of a page is inflated. Doesn’t really work anymore especially in the meta keywords tag which is all but ignored by modern search engines.

Link farms - Building several sites that link together to artificially increase link popularity of a website.

Hijacking - Copying existing websites to rank for their content.

Referer log spamming - Pinging the website logfile in hopes the webmaster will track that URL back to the spam site.

Buying expired domains - To capitalize off their previous success.

Most blackhat websites don’t provide any real value to the visitor and that is why the search engines seek them out and purge them from their index. But as mentioned earlier there are appropriate uses for blackhat techniques.

Consider a real estate listing in a hot market. Taking the time to get that listing ranking at a level that is of value to the real estate agent just isn’t cost-effective. Using blackhat techniques that may get the site popular within weeks instead of months makes sense. But of course the site will eventually get caught and banned.

Blackhat is fine for short-term projects but should not be employed for a website geared for lasting value or long-term search engine success.

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