Black Hat SEO Tactics

There are many ways to deceive search engines, to think that bogus content is actually valuable content. This is not something Google as a company likes, and it's against their quality guidelines:

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

Real life black hats

Never the less, some companies actually sell this as a "service" to their customers. What they do is ask the customer for a number of words they would like to be found on, and build a series of pages where each page's file name and title is one of these words.

The content of the pages are bogus text which at first looks genuine, but if you read it you'll see that it makes no sense at all. These pages link to each other, and are linked to on an index.html page. If a user access one of these pages using a javascript-enabled browser, he is instantly redirected to the website's front page.

The javascript that handles this is disguised in unclear code, which at first glance looks plausible. These pages have no value at all for users, and unless they've disabled javascript in their browser, they'll never see the pages. So why are they there? to fool the search engines into thinking it's valuable content, and include it in the indexes for the website. It's obvious that they don't want to get caught by Google. Why else would they disguise the javascript that redirects the users to the front page? Why else would they use text that look innocent at first, but is just some random text from the website with the particular page's word used 5-10 times throughout?

A better alternative

Don't fall into traps like this. BMW tried it and felt the consequences. Just because you haven't been found out yet, doesn't mean you wont get banned from Google's index at some point.

There are better alternatives. Have a look at my previous posts on this to get some ideas, or just use your common sense. If you want to be found when users type a specific word or phrase, how can you incorporate that into your site, while still giving your users value?

Be sceptical, but not dismissive

There are plenty of "white hat" SEO companies out there, and some of those who use black hat tactics might also be able to help you with true SEO of your website. Just have the company in question explain how they will optimize your website, and make sure it's not against any Google guideline or policy. Google has a page on what to look for in an SEO.