Off-page black hat SEO techniques

Last updated on December 24, 2010. Tags: black hat SEO, blog comment spam, forum spam, link farms, off-page SEO

Off-page blackhat SEO refers to search engine optimization techniques that are forbidden by search engines, considered to be unethical and deceptive and requires the building of inbound links towards the site.

Some of the known off-page blackhat SEO techniques are as follows:

Link farms

The term link farm refers to a group of websites that are linking to one another in an attempt to increase the link popularity of each one of them. Link farms are usually aided by automated programs so that each website automatically adds links to all other members of the linkfarm. Members link to other members regardless of whether these other members are relevant to the topic of the site or not. Link farms are also known as mutual admiration societies.

The major difference between link farms and web directories is that directories are arranged in categories wherein similar sites are grouped together. Moreover, web directories undergo human reviewers while link farms simply add just anyone who joins them and willing to provide reciprocal links. The best web directories are those that cater only certain niches like blog directories, school website directories, sports website directories, etc.

Nowadays, link farms are no longer useful. Google, the most widely used search engine, no longer base the link popularity on just the number of incoming links, but also on the so called Google PR, a number 1 to 10 assigned to a website, wherein the links coming from sites with higher PR are regarded as more powerful "vote". Government websites ending with .gov, school websites ending with .edu as well as news outlets usually have high PR.

Hidden links

These are links that are made invisible; meant only to increase the amount of incoming links of the other website. May work in conjunction to link farms or just an agreement among several parties to link to each other. This is somehow a combination of link farm and invisible text. A webmaster realizes that a number of links in his/her webpage are in fact irrelevant to the topic of his/her website but would still like to retain the incoming link vote and thus he must maintain the outgoing link vote.

His/her "link mates" may know that he turned his/her links invisible, and they may all even agree to make their links to each other invisible. After all, these links are not meant to be clicked by human users. They are meant only to be interpreted by search engines as link votes. Search engines can detect hidden links just as much as they can detect hidden text, and penalize or ban a website for it.

Forum and blog spams

A webmaster create so many posts in forums and blogs (as comments) that contain links towards their website. Typically, the objective of the spammer is to post as many links as possible. To do this, they will often post really short posts, usually smileys or "hello" or "nice post.

Other spammers will go as far as to create programs to automate the process. This is very easy for WordPress because all WordPress comment form contain four fields arranged in the same order: name, email, website URL and comment. The comment field even accepts HTML codes including links.

Fortunately, forums and blog owners are now becoming more vigilant in dealing with spammers. Some forums have policy against posts containing only one liners and smileys and some require members to have certain number of posts before they can post links.

In WordPress, you can choose to regulate the blog comments before they show up. You can also have a list of words frequently used by spammers, in which WordPress will automatically send comments containing those words in the spam box. I recently found this feature to be more useful than IP banning because while spammers can use dynamic IP address or hack other people's computers and use them for spamming, marketing through spamming tends to be limited to certain industries. The Akismet plugin is also very useful in sending spam comments directly to your spam box. It is not entirely accurate but useful in many cases (in my experience, it misidentified only one legitimate comment as spam out of 300 real spams). It also requires you to sign-up to WordPress.com to obtain the API key needed to activate it even if your blog is in your own hosting account.

Moreover, as I mentioned in the white hat side of this discussion, it would be better if you interact and have proper discussions with other bloggers and forum members, and provide exposure for your site directly through those channels instead of hoping only for some PR link juice. That way, people can see you as an expert, not as spammer.

One more thing, if you spam, you might be able produce lots of backlinks, and your out-of-ordinary number of backlinks over a short period of time in turn will alarm Google and other search engines of what you're doing and might penalize or ban your site as a result.

Off-page SEO include actions that you can control and you cannot control. Someone who would like to have your site removed from search engine index might attempt to do things like linking to your site using invisible text, spamming forums and blogs with backlinks or submitting your site to link farms. These are not likely to affect your site but they would not count as "link votes" in your favor.

However, once you link back to link farms or to the site that linked to you using invisible links, that would tell the search engines that you are collaborating with these spammers and you will be penalized by either lowering your rank or removing your site entirely from search results.

Posted by Greten on May 21, 2009 under Search Engine Optimization

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Read Comments

Posted by MicroMixx on 06.25.09 1:47 am

I am receiving tons of blog comment spams everyday. Most of the comments are just telling how good you write on your blog and so on.
Black Hat techniques for SEO are really unethical but those techniques are really helpful in ranking well.
Posted by Geek on 12.16.10 1:19 am

Your article looks very identical to this one.

Do not know who copied from who.
Posted by Greten on 12.16.10 1:14 pm

@Mixx – helpful in short term, but not in the long term.

@Geek – Thank you very much for calling my attention to this. After doing some cursory reading, I think the author of that article took some time editing them even though I can still see exact sentence fragments (but not whole sentences). It appears that s/he also copied another one from this article about black hat SEO. I don’t think s/he would do any damage to my site for now but his/her behavior will be under further observation and legal actions will be taken if deemed necessary.

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