Remember Keyword stuffing through cloaking?

This technique was used over a decade ago when Search Engines where a little less sophisticated.  Back in the late 90’s, early 2000’s, getting to page 1 in a search engine didn’t have the same amount of ranking indicators they currently have.  They relied mostly on 2 things.  Links and keywords.

A lot of early webmaster’s took extreme advantage of this way of ranking and one of the techniques that worked for them was cloaking their keywords on their page.

There were a few ways they did this.  The first way was to take their background color and match it to their text color.  That way they could simply stuff as many keywords as they wanted (both relating and not relating to their content) and the user would not be the wiser.  They would see a normal webpage.  But bot’s crawling the site would see hundreds of keywords used multiple times throughout the page.  The search bots would think the page was something completely different then what the user saw.

The second technique involved stuffing those keywords on the website, but out of the view of the user.  You would make your site much wider then it needed to be and stuff those keywords out of site, in an area the user would never see.  Sometimes you would have to scroll to the right for a good 30 seconds before even seeing the keywords.

Luckily both these techniques are dead and considered black hat seo that will get your site penalized and banned.  By 2005, most of the major search bots could easily spot these techniques.

Things sure were a lot different a decade ago.