Why You Should Avoid Black Hat Seo?

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SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is focused chiefly upon increasing a website’s visibility and the resulting traffic by getting the highest ranks possible on the major search engines. SEO, practiced properly focuses on all of the “right” reasons why a website should be ranked higher than other sites. Google seeks to provide its searchers with the best, most relevant results based on the search criteria (keywords and phrases). Google actually publishes all of the rules to be followed for SEO through its Webmaster Guidelines; as the name implies, this contains everything you need to know to follow legitimate techniques and processes towards marketing your website with all of the correct elements for good SEO results.

Unfortunately, there are those who try to “beat the system;” that is, they engage in trickery using various means as follows:

Hidden text. Hidden text might not be visible to a user or visitor, but it’s readable by search engine bots. The common method for hiding text used to be simply making the font the same ...
... color as the background, but most search engines are usually able to spot this trick. Including hidden text, links or keywords is a way of gaming the system; it might pay off in the short run, but it’s unethical and will get you penalized.

Cloaking. This one has pretty well been debunked these days. Cloaking involves delivering unique content to the search engine spider when it comes to a site so the spider sees content that’s actually different from what a visitor would see. The search engines have been onto this one for awhile, making it ineffective.

Keyword stuffing. This is just a matter of jamming keywords into the website space so many times to fake the search engines into believing it has relevance for the keywords involved; but the content is incoherent and violates keyword density guidelines. If your website is about pasta, a keyword-stuffed sentence might read, “We sell all pasta items for pasta lovers who love pasta to meet their pasta needs with pasta.” Obnoxious? Yes. Keyword-stuffing? Yes. Effective? NO!

Link farms. These are websites that exist for the sole purpose of populating the site with tons of useless, irrelevant links for the purpose of pushing those links to sites owned by naïve clients believing that the getting these links pointing to them will be beneficial for their websites. Link farms are sites that are linked together for no other reason than to boost their popularity. This is pretty common with casino, porn, pill or MLM sites. You do NOT want your site linked to link farms!

These are just a few examples of Black Hat SEO and if you are looking for real and lasting results, you just need to say NO. It’s just fool’s gold; these tricks can actually “work” if you call getting a surge of good ranks and traffic over the very short term “working.” The fact is these techniques never provide lasting results and end up costing you more due to lost opportunities and time wasted on these things as well as the penalties that Google hands out for the use of tactics that are clearly designed to circumvent Google’s objectives towards bringing the best, most relevant results for searchers.

At this point, we believe that anyone using these techniques or allowing this to go on with their site is in complete denial, or possibly, desperate to achieve results generally because of the pressures of business.

SEO is about the long term. It is forever. It is a never ending marathon. There is no place for Black Hat Techniques in this type of scenario.

Since there is Black Hat SEO, there is also White Hat SEO which I think is just ridiculous. What they call White Hat SEO is simply the right SEO i.e. earning the rankings and visibility by focusing on all the key points that are included in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

If you are looking to get results for your online business, contact us. The initial consultation is free.