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Hacking Websites For Links: The Dark Side of SEO

What is SEO

Anyone familiar with web marketing and the techiques which it entails will be aware of the term SEO, which means search engine optimisation. This is an important aspect of building web sites as it allows a site to be properly indexed by way of various other techniques such as keywords, link building, B2B marketing and much much more.

SEO is perhaps the single most important factor, as well as advertising, to building a successfull website and knowing which keywords or which long-tail search to insert into your site can literally make or break your business. For example, if a keyword has a high level of competition it will be unlikely that your website will index quickly in a search engine, and therefore it will take more time and effort for your site to rank properly.

A Darker Side to Optimisation

However, it is not all rosy in the world of SEO and for many years marketers have used less than ethical techniques to ensure ranking above their competitors. With current algorithms which have been adopted as a safety measure by search engines, particularly Google with its Panda updates and beyond, there is less of a chance of cheating search engines with SEO techniques; this is still possible though, and many black-hat SEO techniques exist to circumvent the qualitative aspect which these algorithms prefer.

In short, there is a much darker side to SEO than what ethical content providers are used to, and that is black-hat SEO solely used to rank highly in search engines; there are no scruples nor things which aren’t allowed when cheating a particular search engine, but for the benefit of this article we will be solely looking at what link-hacking means in relation to these black-hat SEO techniques.

We do not in any way encourage anyone to try these techniques, as the best way to rank your site and ensure its success in the long-term is by providing quality content, reputable sources and quality links. This information is, therefore, for informative purposes only.

Hacking Websites for Traffic and Ranking

Black hat techniques were previously considere legitimate, at least in moderation. We all know that in love and war everything is permitted, and this adage is certainly valid for business too. However, some black hat SEO specialists just take it a step too far.

One extreme example of black hat techniques is hacking a competitor’s website in order to ensure it will gradually rank higher and higher in a search engine. This technique is also known as cloaking and it takes an extremely sophisticated hacker to pull it off in a successful manner; those who are new to SEO techniques will certainly not be able to find a cookie-cutter method to these techniques and will not be able to easily implement cloaking or hacking techniques.

Usually, a hacker will insert relevant keywords within the anchor text of a competitor’s site in order to get the “attention” of what is known as a crawler bot. Crawlers work for all the major search engines to look for relevant keywords within a site. By inserting keywords relevant to his own site within a competitor’s anchor text, the hacker will be able to create what is known as an interlaced network, redirecting most traffic to his own site and ranking highly as qualitative content at the same time.

If it all seems complicated, that’s because it is. One wonders whether if the energy spent doing this could be directed elsewhere, such as creating quality content. But then these are the mysteries of the human mind.

Remember to visit http://www.seobrighton.com for all your SEO content, not at all including black-hat SEO techniques.