Black hat

From SEO Wiki

What's in a Hat ?

There are many different strategies for the applyication of Search Engine Optimisation. One way that different techniques have been classified is through the concept of Black Hats and White Hats.

Both tpes of techniques (when applied correctly) can be very effective in improving a sites ranking, however there are important differences :

White Hat techniques are essentially oriented towards improving a sites "User Experience", by providing the type of information that a user is looking for - and making it easier to navigate and find the relevant information on a site.

whereas Black Hat Techniques, are sometimes considered to be risky as they tend to focus on Search Engines rather than users, and aim to convince the Seach Engines that the site is worth looking at

"Black hat" SEO methods

"Black hat" SEO are methods to try to improve rankings that are disapproved of by the search engines and/or involve deception. This can range from text that is "hidden", either as text colored similar to the background or in an invisible or left of visible div, or by redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly. As a general rule, a method that sends a user to a page that was different to the page the search engined ranked is Black hat. One well known example is Cloaking, the practice of serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors.

Search engines can and do penalise sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual review of a site.