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Black SEO – black optimization. How can it help us optimize our site? Sometimes it happens that you want to hide some text from your visitors, leaving it visible only to search engines or vice-verse.

In this post we will talk about some useful sides of the “black optimization”. By Black Hat Seo people usually think of the “link junk yards”, doorways, search engine spam, and so on. I am not one of those optimizers and the information below is probably a “gray” optimization. That’s probably not important, and it’s actually important for the information to be useful. You be the judge…

This post describes list of approaches that possibly will help you better use links, images, text with keywords, scripts, and maybe something else. These techniques could help when creating ajax projects, dynamic pages or simply can become part of our internal site optimization. Ok, enough talking let’s get going…

Using display:none

Sometimes when creating a website, a page, or a post there can be a reason to hide text from the visitor, leaving it visible to the search engines (this works with dynamic ajax pages as well). Using the “dislpay:none” is now an old trick, but not the best one. Some search engines will reduce the keyword weight on the page when it’s included in display:none effect. If you carefully look through the server logs, you will see that except for the regular pages search bots also request .css styles, in order to use built-in intelligent systems to find discrepancies.

However, as far as I know, people do not receive an automatic ban for these activities. The weight of the keywords will significantly go down (even if it’s an h1). Please keep in mind, if someone snitches on you, your site will fall under the filter and then it’s going to have an impact similar to ban.

Using text-indent-1000

This is a better looking approach to hide text or a link. It works only with block elements. It’s useful when applying to logos on web 2.0 sites.

For instance, for a while I was using this on my site:

<a href=”/” class=“logo”></a>

in the header, where in the A tag with the .css was placing the logo as a background. Then I decided that the link doesn’t take part in the search engine rendering and it was changed to:

<a href=”/” class=“logo”>your keyword goes here</a>

and the following line was added to the .css:

.logo {text-indent:-1000em;display:block;}

This allowed me to make the keyword participate in the rendering process when at the same time everything seemed unchanged for the visitors. Also, with this style you can hide blocks of links, adding the position:absolute to them, so there are no empty spots where the links should have appeared (yes, that’s pretty neat stuff I agree)

Using noframe and noscript tags

Most of the browsers support noframe and noscript tags, except for some (those need to be configured in the browser settings). When placing links in these tags, visitors will not know about the existence of these links, but the search engines will.

I often noticed this type of code when placing a referral links. Many affiliate programs offer you making money on the referrals and let you place their code on your page, which besides the script includes noframe, where partners themselves kill two birds – traffic + part of your site.

Making links the same color as the text, without underlining and the “text” type cursor

Sometimes it’s useful to unload links with text, in order to avoid confusing your visitors. There are many ways to do this, however, the simplest way is to make the links the same color as the text, and at the same time taking off the underlining. In this case CSS rule entry will look like this:

.link {color:#000;text-decoration:none;cursor:text;}

Making links the same color as the background

This is a very common way to hide links, but this one almost always results in a ban, unless it’s designed for a noble reasons:)

1 pixel images, 1 pixel font

You can create a very small images for the design of your site. You can make 1px images with keywords in the Alt tags. Also, you can insert text with very small font (when at the same time combining this approach with other methods of hiding text)

Changing links, changing DOM document with JavaScript

With the help of JavaScript it’s possible to change isolated elements as well as the entire site structure: add and delete links, add and delete text and so on. Please note that Google executes simple javascripts, that’s why when creating links and wanting to hide them from the search engine systems, it’s a must to deploy more advanced and complicated scripts. For example a script with eval and escape.

Simple example of this approach can be found in any article on Wikipedia. First open the article and look at the document structure in the browser. Then turn off the JavaScript in your browser and open the same page again. The difference will be visible in the headers, which have the edit settings when the JavaScript is turned on.

This method is very useful when creating dynamic ajax pages and if you have a desire to optimize and make your content unique for the search engine systems.

Using JavaScript’s document.write

Please note right away, this method will not work with Google.

document.write(“<a href=’http://link.to/site.html’>your link</a>”);

Other approaches

There are many other methods of creating the internal deception, I mean optimization:) Some of those can be a web 2.0 navigation, using iframe, overflow:hidden, using the typos, for example:

HTML

m<span class=“h”>;</span>usic

CSS

span.h {display:none;}

As a result, when using this tactic, the word “music” will be displayed normally. I think this example by itself is enough to see how the visitor can be presented with the correct writing of the word.

Note to self:

Often it’s tough to differentiate between white and Black Hat SEO, especially when creating dynamic pages. From one angle it’s all good – creating the internal optimization of the site, text, and links, when at some point you will encounter difficulties that can only be solved by the Black Hat SEO optimization methods.

The above approaches are just an observation and not a recommendation to use.

Beck @ ProfitSEO.com

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