search engine optimization tactics that are not looked upon as favorable by the search engines as they try to exploit search engine algorithms.

Optimization techniques that cause a site to rank more highly and artificially inflate its rankings or changes made specifically for search engines that do not improve the user's experience of the site are considered black hat SEO.

Your site can be penalized and even banned for utilizing black hat SEO techniques as per the search engines. Black Hat SEO includes things such as:

• cloaking
• creating doorway pages
• keyword stuffing
• spamming blogs or forums
• artificially building your link inventory by purchasing mass amounts of links
• participating in link farms
• use of invisible text to artificially improve keyword density