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Beware of Black Hat SEO Techniques

There are always trends in marketing. And in the online world they seem to come fast and furious. Some of these trends are beneficial (Social Media is most definitely one of them!), and some of them are questionable. It has become common in the industry to refer to SEO practices as “White Hat” (good guy – honest – good practice) and “Black Hat” (sneaky – not always on the up and up). Many SEO firms in today’s world will promise you “First Page Listings” in Google and other SE’s.

Beware of Black Hat SEO

SEO techniques are classified by some into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites will eventually be banned once the search engines discover what they are doing. (from Wikipedia)

There are SEO techniques or “trends” that can get you in trouble, so know your risks

Spamdexing – (aka search spam) repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system. Here are three common ways of “spamdexing”:

Keyword Stuffing – calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. Long lists of keywords or keyword phrases placed within page content (or in most cases, at the end of the page content) are considered keyword stuffing. Making them into internal links does not negate the fact that it’s stuffing! Which brings us to…

Link Spam – links between pages that are present for reasons other than merit (or good content). Hidden links or putting hyperlinks where visitors will not see them to increase link popularity. Highlighted link text can help rank a webpage higher for matching that phrase.

Article Spinning – rewriting existing articles by changing a few words here and there, to avoid penalties imposed by search engines for duplicate content.

Another frowned upon SEO technique is Hidden Content – adding pages and/or content to your site that is not viewable by your site’s visitors, but created specifically for the search engines.

While many forms of spamdexing and hidden content are practiced today, and they can, and often do, produce positive short term SEO results – they can be a risky practice. SE’s have been known to ban a site for these methods. Most SEO professionals will tell you that SEO is a process..and a process that takes time. Anything worthwhile does, right?

So what can you do as a website owner? Sometimes even with a good SEO plugin the time required to optimize your site just is not available (whether it’s your time or an employee’s time). If you have to hire an SEO firm, be sure they tell you up-front what techniques they will use. Get details. Discuss risks. Find out what they will do if their process causes your site to be banned. If they promise you a first page or top listing…find out exactly what keyword or keyword phrase that will be for (you may be surprised to find it’s not so relevant to your site’s content). In a nutshell, be aware…

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE TO READ:

Google Says Goodbye to Black Hat SEO
The 5 Best White Hat SEO Techniques
There is Nothing “Urgent” in SEO


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