Monday, August 3, 2009

Rising Black Hat SEO Techniques

SEO techniques are divided into two parts, techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve. These techniques are known to many webmasters as the White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing. The one reason why many webmasters still employ Black Hat SEO techniques is because of its quick results compared to White Hat. However, its results may only go as far compared to White Hat SEO which can provide permanent or long-lasting results. Although issues pertaining to the use of Black Hat SEO have been widely diminished by changing a search engine's algorithm, such as the use of keyword stuffing in Meta Tags or Link Farming, several techniques have been currently used to manipulate the results of search engines. Some of these techniques have not yet been widely used as Black Hat SEO, but many consultants have come to consider these techniques are indeed a violation of search engine guidelines. These Black Hat SEO techniques include:
Scraper Sites Sybil Attack Splogs Page Hijacking Cookie Stuffing Blog Spamming Cloaking Scraper Sites This technique usually involves copying all the content of a website to a scraper site by use of web scrapping, which is a tool used for extracting information from a website. Although it may look like a search engine, usually because search engines does the same method by extracting information from a website and indexing it on their own, search engines are not scraper sites. In the last few years, and due to the advent of the Google Adsense web advertising program, scraper sites have proliferated at an amazing rate for spamming search engines. Open content sites such as Wikipedia are a common source of material for scraper sites. Scraper sites are widely used today as a way to gain profit by use of advertising programs such as Google AdSense. According to different SEO Philippines consultants, these sites are commonly known as Made for AdSense. Made for AdSense sites are considered sites that are spamming search engines and diluting the search results by providing surfers with less-than-satisfactory search results. The scraped content is considered redundant to that which would be shown by the search engine under normal circumstances had no Made for AdSense ebsite been found in the listings. Sybil Attack Named after a book called Sybil, a case study of a woman with multiple personality disorder, Sybil Attack is an attack wherein a reputation system is subverted by forging multiple identities in peer-to-peer networks. A reputation system's vulnerability to a Sybil attack depends on how cheaply identities can be generated, the degree to which the reputation system accepts inputs from entities that do not have a chain of trust linking them to a trusted entity, and whether the reputation system treats all entities identically. A faulty node or an adversary may present itself with multiple identities in a peer-to-peer network to appear and function as distinct nodes. By becoming part of the peer-to-peer network, the adversary may then overhear communications or act maliciously. By masquerading and presenting multiple identities, the adversary can control the network substantially. Splogs Spam blogs or usually known as Splogs are blogs particularly made for spamming. This is used to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. This in turn will increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites. There is frequent confusion between the terms "splog" and "spam in blogs". Splogs are blogs where the articles are fake, and are only created for search engine spamming. To spam in blogs, conversely, is to include random comments on the blogs of innocent bystanders, in which spammers take advantage of a site's ability to allow visitors to post comments that may include links. In fact, one of the earliest uses of the term "splog" referred to the latter. Splogs have become a major problem on free blog hosts such as Google's Blogger service. By one estimate, about one in five blogs are spam blogs.
According to different SEO Philippines consultants, these fake blogs waste valuable disk space and bandwidth as well as pollute search engine results, ruining blog search engines and damaging bloggers community networking. One particular problem is using popular blog names from other bloggers. Splogs sometimes choose a name similar to a popular blog in order to benefit from the occasional incoming link from careless bloggers, who think they are linking to the popular site. Splog activity can cause problems for legitimate bloggers, if search engines respond to splog by blocking or treating as 'suspicious' all web addresses in a particular domain. Page Hijacking Page hijacking is a form of search engine index spamming. It is achieved by creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites. Spammers can use this technique to achieve high rankings in result pages for certain key words. Page hijacking is a form of cloaking, made possible because some web crawlers detect duplicates while indexing web pages. If two pages have the same content, only one of the URLs will be kept. A spammer will try to ensure that the rogue website is the one shown on the result pages. Cookie Stuffing Cookie stuffing can sometimes be a blackhat online marketing technique used to generate fraudulent affiliate sales. It involves placing an affiliate tracking cookie on a website visitor's computer without their knowledge, which will then generate revenue for the person doing the cookie stuffing. Income is generated when the affected user visits the target affiliate site and either creates an account or makes a purchase, depending on the terms of the affiliate agreement. Operators of websites that allow user-generated content, such as forums that allow users to post, should be aware of this technique in order to protect their visitors from this attack. Cookie stuffing can be accomplished with as little as including an image in a forum post.
Blog Spamming One of the most widely used form of Black Hat SEO today, blog spamming. This is usually done with the use of a software that automatically generates random comments to blogs. According to different SEO Philippines consultants, any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target. Adding links that point to the spammer's web site artificially increases the site's search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer's commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers. Cloaking Cloaking refers to any of several means to serve a page to the search-engine spider that is different from that seen by human users. It can be an attempt to mislead search engines regarding the content on a particular web site. Cloaking, however, can also be used to ethically increase accessibility of a site to users with disabilities or provide human users with content that search engines aren't able to process or parse.

0 comments: