Black Hat Web Promotion, The Scourge of Online Business
Black Hat web promotion companies promise to deliver
top rankings fast, often charging extortionate rates
for what are at best short-lived benefits.
While ethical SEO companies work hard to improve their clients'
websites with a view to sustained long-term search engine
rankings, these shady operators are giving the entire industry a bad name, not only through exorbitant prices, but because their results rarely last more than a few weeks or months.
Since Google is constantly evolving to provide
visitors with the most relevant results possible, any
attempt at exploiting loopholes in its algorithm will,
at best, only last until the next major search algorithm change.
Black Hat Web Promotion Companies are duping business owners
Customers will often spend thousands
for top rankings that vanish overnight.
But what exactly is Black Hat Web Promotion, and how can
you tell it apart from its ethical ‘White Hat’ counterpart.
For the answer to this particular question to truly make sense, you have to understand that Google and the other search engines seek to
provide visitors with the most appropriate answers to
their queries. The watchwords in this endeavor 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, website structure, internal link structure, W3C
compliance, other coding issues, and a mythical animal known as TrustRank.
Relevance is based on three major factors
The quality of the website’s
(or page’s) content
Its overall level of information
about its chosen topic
The number of quality inbound links
from sites specialising in a related field
Google claims to utilize over two-hundred signals to ascertain a web page's search-ranking for any given keyword or phrase.
The whole point of ethical (White Hat) search engine
optimisation, is to make improvements to the client’s
website by adding informative content, cleaning the source
code, improving the file and link structures, and generally doing all the things required to turn
it into a quality resource in Google's eyes.
Black Hat web promotion tactics try to 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 ranking performance naturally, they employ
unethical tactics to boost a site’s rankings without
consideration for the long-term effects on their client’s
business, which often include ranking penalties, or even an
outright ban from Google's search index.
Google WILL catch up with you...
The simple 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. If you're still unsure what constitues unethical tactics, you might want to look at Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
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.
Just bear in mind what the Webmaster Guidlines say: "It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it."
