1. Link farms-it is sometimes referred to as mutual admiration societies. This refers to several websites that are linking with each other with the sole purpose of increasing their link popularity. This usually done with the help of programs that automate the process.
Link farms are different from web directories because the latter arranges the websites according to their categories. Also, unlike link farms where anyone who is willing to provide reciprocal links can join, web directories undergo human examiners to check the validity of the sites.
Note for people who thinks that engaging in link farms is the solution to their problem: Link farms no longer work nowadays because search engines, especially Google, neither use link popularity as the sole basis for website ranking nor base link popularity solely on the number of incoming links.
Now, Google implements Page Ranks (PR). They assign numbers 1 to 10 to different websites-1 as the lowest and 10, the highest. The links that come from authoritative websites or with higher PR are deemed as powerful "votes". Thus, the more powerful links you acquire, the better your ranking and the higher your PR rate will be.
Examples of websites that seem to have consistently high PR are government and school websites. These sites end with.gov or.edu, respectively
2. Hidden Links/Invisible Texts
This blackhat SEO technique is usually done in conjunction to link farms. Although the links may not be relevant to the content of the site, some webmasters do they realized that to retain the incoming link vote they must also maintain the outgoing link vote.
Webmasters create a separate page that they fill with keywords that may or may not be related to the topic of their site. This is definitely not for human users because the texts are invisible to the human eye, but visible to the search robots.
People who engage in link farms may agree to make their links to each other invisible to be interpreted by the search engines as link votes. Keep in mind that if search engines can detect invisible texts, they can also detect invisible links. If they can ban or sanction websites with invisible texts, they can also sanction websites with invisible links.
3. Spamming Forums and Blogs
This is done by creating several posts on forums and blog comment sections that contain links that point towards a particular website with the purpose of increasing link popularity. Most often than not, posts include short messages (hello, smiley face) and then the links
Other blackhat SEO enthusiasts go as far as using programs to automate the process. This process is easily performed on WordPress sites because it accepts HTML codes and links.
Bad news is, forums and blog owners are now more vigilant in blocking these spammers. They either ban or delete people who merely posts one-liners, smileys and links. Some even require people to reach a certain number of posts before they are allowed to post links.
For WordPress blogs, you can regulate these types of spammy messages by having a list of words that are frequently used by these spammers. WordPress, automatically send several comments that contain those words in the spam box. This is more efficient that IP Panning because other spammers can utilize dynamic IP add or use other computers.
In the eyes of the search engines, these techniques are downright deceptive and unethical. It takes advantage of their system's flaws to rank in the search results. To prevent people from abusing the system, search engines constantly update their system to track down and sanction websites that utilize blackhat SEO techniques.
0
