Black Hats or BH

Are they people? Or a certain kind of website?

[webdreamer]

I keep reading about BH or Black Hats. Can someone explain WHAT they are, or who they WHO they are?
Thank you in advance.

[Quinn]

A gweat and tewwible question Webdreamer!

Anyone?

[webdreamer]

Hmmm, don't know what to make of that answer?

[arran]

Black Hat website - a website using questionable tactics to rank well.

Black Hat - A webmaster running one or more Black Hat websites (see above).

All we have to do now is define 'questionable'...

arran.

[webdreamer]

I see the term hand-in-hand with skyscraper advertising. I wasn't sure if it just meant a website that is loaded with ads.

Thanks arran, your comment helps answer my question.

The "Black Hat" term is like the bad guys in an old western movie.

[annej]

It's easy to see the spammy looking sites as black hat but some very professional looking sites could be using black hat practices. It's more if they are doing things Google or other search engines would see as cheating to get up in the rankings.

In other words the bad guy may be sneaky and wear a white hat instead of his black hat.

[larryhatch]

For me, Black Hat goes beyond spammy sites. It implies dirty or illegal tricks like:

1) Phony links traded for for real (<a> href=) links.
2) Scraped / plagiarized and/or uncredited content
3) Blatant KW stuffing, especially when cloaked or masked.
4) Link farms, link rings/triangles and variations.
5) Framing the contents of other sites without permission or notification.
6) Click attacks on competitors adsense or other ads.
7) Denial of Service attacks (DOS)
8) Rewriting pages of other sites to capture them within the BH domain.
9) 301 page hi-jacking.
10) Machine Spamming blogs or guestbooks to gain links.
11) Slander.

That's only 11 things off the top of my head. There must be many many more. -Larry

[webdreamer]

Can't G tell if someone is "click attacking" a competitor's adsense? That's beat if an innocent webmaster gets penalized for someone elses dirty deeds.