Online Marketing Why Black Hat SEO Is A Ticking Time Bomb For Your Website
If you have been researching SEO for any length of time in the hope of boosting your company website’s search engine ranking you may have come across the terms ‘White Hat‘ and ‘Black Hat’. These are terms which identify SEO techniques, and strategies at either end of the scale when it comes to whether the search engines, and in particular Google, approve of them.
With white hat SEO, all the actions which you or your SEO consultant take will be those which Google, and in turn the other search engine companies, accept are legitimate ways to try to help your website’s ranking. These actions include:
- Using an exact match domain or sub-domains
- Publishing keyword optimized content
- Setting up meta data correctly such as the page title and description
- Posting content on other sites with links back to your site
- Gaining backlinks from high ranked websites in your niche or industry
For one or two of these, some purists might claim they are ‘grey hat‘ but none of these will be seen by Google as trying to game the system. In truth, Google wants webmasters to use these techniques as it helps them identify what your website is about.
On the other side of the coin is black hat SEO, which as the name suggests are the techniques used by many SEO agencies to trick Google into giving a website a higher ranking than it deserves. Some of the methods used are:
- Using spam comments to gain backlinks from blogs and forums
- Stuffing content with keywords
- Buying backlinks from link farms
- Setting up and linking back from PBNs (personal blog networks)
- Spamming social network sites
No matter how tempted you might be to use black hat SEO methods to improve your website’s ranking, there will undoubtedly come a time when it backfires and you will regret doing it.
Google is constantly updating and upgrading their ranking algorithm to try to ensure the quality of their results is as high as possible. More importantly, they are improving their ability to seek out websites which are using the black hat SEO methods they disapprove of.
The penalties they can impose on your website go as far as ensuring it never gets found again in the search engines, and if your business relies heavily on online traffic and customers, it can literally close you down overnight.
Resist the temptation of using black hat SEO as it’s the equivalent of placing a ticking time bomb under your business and counting down to the moment it goes off, or rather when Google catch up with you. When this happens your website ranking will be destroyed, and with it your business could perish too.
If you have been researching SEO for any length of time in the hope of boosting your company website’s search engine ranking you may have come across the terms ‘White Hat‘ and ‘Black Hat’. These are terms which identify SEO techniques, and strategies at either end of the scale when it comes to whether the search engines, and in particular Google, approve of them.
With white hat SEO, all the actions which you or your SEO consultant take will be those which Google, and in turn the other search engine companies, accept are legitimate ways to try to help your website’s ranking. These actions include:
- Using an exact match domain or sub-domains
- Publishing keyword optimized content
- Setting up meta data correctly such as the page title and description
- Posting content on other sites with links back to your site
- Gaining backlinks from high ranked websites in your niche or industry
For one or two of these, some purists might claim they are ‘grey hat‘ but none of these will be seen by Google as trying to game the system. In truth, Google wants webmasters to use these techniques as it helps them identify what your website is about.
On the other side of the coin is black hat SEO, which as the name suggests are the techniques used by many SEO agencies to trick Google into giving a website a higher ranking than it deserves. Some of the methods used are:
- Using spam comments to gain backlinks from blogs and forums
- Stuffing content with keywords
- Buying backlinks from link farms
- Setting up and linking back from PBNs (personal blog networks)
- Spamming social network sites
No matter how tempted you might be to use black hat SEO methods to improve your website’s ranking, there will undoubtedly come a time when it backfires and you will regret doing it.
Google is constantly updating and upgrading their ranking algorithm to try to ensure the quality of their results is as high as possible. More importantly, they are improving their ability to seek out websites which are using the black hat SEO methods they disapprove of.
The penalties they can impose on your website go as far as ensuring it never gets found again in the search engines, and if your business relies heavily on online traffic and customers, it can literally close you down overnight.
Resist the temptation of using black hat SEO as it’s the equivalent of placing a ticking time bomb under your business and counting down to the moment it goes off, or rather when Google catch up with you. When this happens your website ranking will be destroyed, and with it your business could perish too.