Because of the increasing competition among business owners to land the first page on any search engine result, more and more unscrupulous individuals have found it easier to make use of techniques that do not actually provide long-term positive results. Such techniques are what is commonly known as Black Hat SEO Techniques.

As opposed to White Hat SEO techniques, black hat makes use of strategies that might seem to be unfair and are aimed only at increasing the page rank regardless of the page's content. This technique is usually penalized by the various search engines. The most common black hat technique is keyword stuffing. What happens here is that the web pages usually contain random keyword phrases in the hopes that it would help the site achieve higher ranking. Although this might prove to be effective, in the long-run, this can cause your site to be penalized.

Similar to keyword stuffing, there are also a number of sites that make use of doorway pages and spam pages. Doorway pages, also known as bridge pages, jump pages and gateway pages, can be set up in different ways, one of which is by submitting a page to search engines that contain various keywords. Most doorway pages are not visible to readers, only to the search engines.

Another black hat technique that most Scottsdale SEO professionals would advise you against is the use of invisible text. This is done by putting on keywords using a font color that is the same as the background. Although most people think that this fools search engines, in actuality, most search engines can detect it and can have the site penalized. Recent changes in how search engines index pages have made it impossible for black hat followers to make use of the invisible text.

A number of seasoned Scottsdale website design professionals who are familiar with search engine optimization would warn you against the use of cloaking. This technique involves presenting an entirely different site to the search engine crawlers as opposed to what your reader's actually see in their web browsers.

Finally, most Scottsdale website design professionals, who also specialize in search engine optimization, count link farming as another black hat SEO technique. This involves exchanging links with a great number of sites in the hopes of making the search engine think that your site is more popular than it really is. Although this produces a short-term effect, it still could, in the long run, cause your site's rank to come crashing down especially if the links are not of good quality.