There is a lot of tough competition on the web these days, and there is much money to be made from having the top search engine results, with this brings some shady characters into the world of internet marketing, and people who use unethical methods to achieve higher rankings for web sites are often referred to as “Blackhats”. Sometimes we refer to techniques as “blackhat SEO”. Blackhat SEO can work to move a web site up in the search results, but there are many catches with using these unethical methods.
I do not intend to debate what is and what isn’t blackhat SEO, or even get into a row about grey areas, there has been plenty of debate about that elsewhere. This post is more for people who are looking to get help with better search engine placement, people who don’t know what is involved in the process. This post is a warning post for web site owners who are considering various SEO or internet marketing companies.
Blackhat techniques are frowned upon by those in the SEO business for the most part, and they are definitely frowned upon by google, and the other major search engines. Sure some of those techniques may work in the short term, but the long term cost is something to consider.
If someone uses blackhat techniques to get your site higher up in the search engine results, and then a few weeks later you find your web site is completely gone out of the search results, or stuck on page 88 of google results, then you will be paying dearly, stuck in the google penalty box.
For some time many blackhat techniques worked well, and then a bunch o web sites found themselves knocked down, knocked way back in the search results, and many web site owners could not understand why. I have read many horror stories from people wondering why google suddenly hated their site and stuck them so far back in the search results. Often it was discovered that the web site owners had employed or contracted an SEO company that promised to get the to the top or number one position in google, and then later google discovered techniques used that violated the webmaster guidelines that google adheres to.
Sometimes google simply changed their their algorithm to discover unethical practices better, and sometimes another webmaster finds some blackhat techniques and reports the offended pages to google, which in turn can get many web sites across the web knocked down the results. Sometimes a webmaster finds that their site has been hacked and some blackhat seo hacker added a bunch of links to his clients sites, and then they all get removed.
At one point we found a blackhat SEO company had hacked into a clients web site and added thousands of links to his pages, costing precious page rank of our client, and giving link love to other people in a way that was unethical and most likely illegal. that day we removed thousands of blackhat spam pages from one web server, and the blackhat company that was using those links to help build their client’s web site strength lost all of those links and all of his clients’ web sites certainly suffered.
We only use white hat techniques for getting web sites better positions in the search engines. Sometimes this takes time, but it is the preferred method to guarantee a longer happy relationship with google and the other search engines. Sometimes the art of the web requires us to report other web sites using blackhat techniques, and if we find your competition using these methods, we will help to resolve it. Just another added bonus for working with us at front page results, and something you should definitely be aware of.
If you are considering a company for your SEO, will you understand everything that they will be doing to get your site to be more popular? Will you understand if they are using blackhat techniques? Will you be able to undo the damage to your site that a blackhat company creates? I have seen a few web site owners that had no idea how it was done, and had no way to change it, and even years later their site is no longer found in google, even though for 2 months they had enjoyed the number one position for several great keywords.
Word to the wise, buyer beware.
Forbes published an excellent article about the Worst SEO Mistakes you can Make – it’s a great article about the negative effects of short cut, black hat SEO techniques that some of the other SEO companies employ. Cheap, automated internet marketing programs are not the way to go.