Black Hat SEO can be dangerous

In the world of internet marketing it is easy to understand how cut throat it can be.  For this reason many SEO practitioners are tempted to throw caution to the wind and grab whatever opportunities they can to get high rankings.  There are even SEO agencies around that will help do this.  Yet they aren’t the ones who have to bear the eventual consequences, you are.  What we are talking about in particular are Black Hat SEO techniques.

Black Hat SEO practices

Very loosely Black Hat SEO practices encompass anything that is contrary to search engine rules.  If you get caught  by search engines algorithms and you end up being penalised then you are guilty of Black Hat SEO.  However Black Hat SEO can be a gray line as many rules and stipulations are not fully understood by SEO practitioners.  But that is another article altogether.  What this article is focusing on is blatant Black Hat SEO.

Some of the most common Black Hat SEO techniques are:

•    Creating doorway pages, or pages that are created only for search engines and not humans
•    Adding hidden text.  This is text that is the same colour as the background and so cannot be seen by humans.  They can however be seen by search engine spider.
•    Keyword stuffing is the art of inserting too many keywords per body of text.  Usually anything above a 2% ratio to text is too much
•    Using keywords that have noting t do with your product or services
•    Participating in link farms or
•    Creating duplicate pages
•    Cloaking. Cloaking is the art of hiding what your website is offering behind keywords that have nothing to do with it.  For instance a porn site may hide behind cloaking in order to get traffic to their site.

Consequences of Black Hat SEO

There are consequences involved if a site is found to be participating in Black Hat SEO.  For some it may be worth the risk, for others it can be devastating. Search engines do not care whether a site is a high profile corporate brand or the ‘guy next door’.   It is also a good idea to remember that websites are not told about the banning until it has happened.  You get no forewarning and your site is taken off the index list.  Unless you are able to appeal it will never be listed again.

For instance BMW got their website banned for using doorways pages while RICOH a German giant got de-listed after it was found they were using spam techniques.  They were re-listed however but not until they had apologised and made changes.

Potential benefits

With anything in life Black Hat SEO can provide potentials.  But one should rather be aware of the pitfalls. Apart from getting banned from search engine listings for life your rankings could drop so radically that you are for all intents and purposes non existent.  Your traffic will fall off and your revenue dry up.  Your reputation will suffer too.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 9:15 am and is filed under SEO Sins & Mistakes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.