In doing my keyword research I found two sites which used clear black hat SEO practices yet they both ranked very highly on Google. I thought I would research two of these sites risking my computer in the process to demonstrate the black hat practices inherent in each.
The first website that used black hat practices was pickupplease.org an arm of Vietnam Veterans of America the site used some basic but somewhat subtle keyword stuffing tactics for example they used many common keywords associated with searches for donation see the attached image for more details. But here is a good example “Pickup Please will come and pick up the following donations:.. Household items Donations in Pittsburgh”. Clearly the intent for this list to not be human readable content but a list of “relevant” keywords for the crawler bot. What I find odd is that they were able to rank with this relatively obvious black hat effort. Ranking 5th for “Clothing Drop Off”.
The second site is grove-city.second-hand.shop (note I do not recommend visiting this site I am quite sure it is virus infested.) The site appears to be some sort of secondhand market place but the content is so scatter shot it is impossible to tell what the intent of the site is the website has many pieces of content with no relation to one another. Despite this seeming randomness the site is actually, based on further research, a doorway page or SEO farm. Somehow the page mentions restaurants, snacks, secondhand stores, Prada bags, and outlet mall stores. All in an effort to appear to be a more legitimate source of information. It also uses a domain that sounds authoritative to the user and google. This site was actually very helpful though as it showed me a possible weakness in local search rankings. I can perhaps push it aside with quality relevant content rather than spam.
3 Responses
Oh wow! Very interesting. It’s cool that you could work to detect that within those sites.
This is an interesting analysis of black hat SEO in action. I like how you used real examples to show keyword stuffing and doorway pages, and how they still ranked highly. Your conclusion about competing with quality, relevant content instead of spam shows strong critical thinking about ethical SEO.
This in an interesting post! I like how you found actual real-world examples of black hat SEO instead of just writing about what it is. It’s interesting how sites actually use black hat SEO practices and it can actually be used to scam people, especially the elderly.