Is black hat back?

Firms employing white hat techniques to drive their search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign may be concerned to hear suggestions that black hat SEO may be making a comeback.

In a recent blog for e-Consultancy, Julian Grainger stated he is increasingly coming across "blatant black hat SEO" practices, which were banned from the index previously.

Furthermore, reporting such discoveries to the web spam team now appears to be less successful than it was, with Mr Grainger likening its submission form to a black hole.

As a result, he asked if black hat techniques such as hidden writing ad cloaking are now OK and if Google is more set on "world domination" than concentrating on the customer.

Three forms of black hat Mr Grainger details include web spam - where the content is made up of Adwords which cannot be indexed - cloaking - where the whole page is different in Google than the code being represented - and hidden text, where content only visible to Google helps push up rankings.

"But despite these problems being reported to Google and a loud complaint on the webmasters portal Google appear blind," he concluded.

A report by Sunbelt Software recently revealed that hackers are set to make SEO a key trend in 2010.

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