Black Hat Web Promotion - The Scourge of
Online Business
Published: 29th of October 2006
Whilst ethical operators work hard to improve their client’s
sites with a view to sustained long-term search engine
rankings, Black Hat web promotion companies are giving
the industry in general a bad name by promising to deliver
top rankings fast and charging often extortionate rates
for what are at best short-lived benefits.
Since search engines are constantly evolving to provide
visitors with the most relevant results possible, any
attempt at exploiting loopholes in their systems will,
at best, only last until the next major search engine
algorithm change.
In many cases, customers will spend thousands of pounds
for top 10 rankings which disappear without trace after
a few weeks or a couple of months.
But what exactly is Black Hat Web Promotion and how can
you tell it apart from its ethical ‘White Hat’ counterpart.
One must first understand that search engines seek to
provide visitors with the most appropriate answers to
their queries.
The watchwords here are ‘quality’ and ‘relevance’
- Quality relates to a search engine’s overall
perception of the site which is based on ease of navigation
for visitors, internal link structure, W3C
compliance and other coding issues.
- Relevance is based on two major factors; a site’s
(or page’s) content and its overall level of information
about any given topic and the number of inbound links
from sites specialising in a related subject
The whole point of ethical (White Hat) search engine
optimisation is to make improvements to a client’s
sites by adding informative content, cleaning the source
code and generally doing all the things required to turn
it into a quality resource in search engine’s eyes.
Black Hat web promotion tactics fool a search engine
into delivering ‘false results’.
That is to say, instead of making improvements to a site’s
overall quality so as to boost its performance, they employ
unethical tactics to boost a site’s rankings without
consideration for the long-term effects on their client’s
sites which can often include ranking penalties or an
outright ban by the major search engines.
The fact is that any results achieved through unethical
or downright illegitimate means (doorway pages, keyword
spamming, hidden text, etc.) are likely to disappear as
fast as they were obtained.
In page two of this article, we provide a quick overview
of the most commonly employed Black Hat web promotion
tactics, although it should be noted that there are so
many different approaches taken by these operators (both
automated and manual) that it would be almost impossible
to list them all in one place.
Click here for page two of this article ‘Black
Hat Web Design’
Competent Web Design ensures a search engine friendly
site
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