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Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:
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• Use of automated posting

• Use of automated profile creation

• No interest in adding value to the site they piggyback off

• Breaks search engine rules and regulations

• Creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site

• Unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

Black Hat SEO Techniques To Avoid
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Signature and Profile Spam:
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Through the use of software such as xrumer SEOs create hundreds or thousands of backlinks to the clients website. The profiles serve no other purpose but to trick search engines into ranking a website higher.

Automated Posting to forums/cms:
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Through the use of software such as xrumer, which automates posting of content, SEOs create hundreds or thousands of posts, content with backlinks to customers website.

Human posters:
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SEOs recruit internet users in Bangladesh, India (and other low labor cost countries) and pay them a small fee to create profiles and post content with links. These users then post useless or unrelated content (with links) to forums which in turn necessitate moderators policing the website (cost factor for website owners).

Keyword stuffing:
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Packing long lists of keywords and nothing else onto your site will get you penalized eventually by search engines. Learn how to find and place keywords and phrases the right way on your Web site with my article titled Learn Where And How To Put Keywords In Your Site Pages.

Invisible text:
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This is putting lists of keywords in white text on a white background in hopes of attracting more search engine spiders. Again, not a good way to attract searchers or search engine crawlers.

Doorway Pages:
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A doorway page is basically a “fake” page that the user will never see. It is purely for search engine spiders, and attempts to trick them into indexing the site higher.

Black Hat SEO is tempting; after all, these tricks actually do work, temporarily. They do end up getting sites higher search rankings; that is, until these same sites get banned for using unethical practices. It’s just not worth the risk. Use efficient search engine optimization techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like Black Hat SEO.

A lot of what is known as black hat SEO actually used to be legit, but some folks went a bit overboard and now these techniques are frowned upon by the general SEO community at large. These black hat SEO practices will actually provide short-term gains in terms of rankings, but if you are discovered utilizing these spammy techniques on your Web site, you run the risk of being penalized by search engines. Black hat SEO basically is a short-sighted solution to a long-term problem, which is creating a Web site that provides both a great user experience and all that goes with that.

with content from
websearch.about.com/od/seononos/a/spamseo.htm