SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization and Black Hat SEO refers to the misuse of optimization techniques in a way that could get your website harshly penalized by search engines.
There was a time not long ago when people would create a website just so they could say they had one. But when those that ventured into e-commerce starting ringing up vast sales volumes, the competitive nature of business caused e-tailers and others to start looking at the factors involved when search engines spill out their results.
Today, it isn’t enough to just put something online. You have to put something online that people will be able to find by doing a search on their friendly neighborhood search engine, i.e. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc.
Intense competition sometimes brings out the best in us; sometimes it brings out the worst. And in the SEO arena, it’s more often than not, the worst.
So if somebody calls you and tells you they can guarantee page one in Google for only $5,000 – or whatever – do yourself a favor and spend the five Gs on yourself or someone you love. DO NOT waste your money with these charlatans. They are “Black Hat” SEO people in its purest form.
But there are other, less insidious forms of Black Hat SEO and most of that can also be called cheating. A lot of those techniques were legal, once, but not anymore. Here’s a short list, courtesy of Wendy Boswell, at Ask.com:
- Keyword stuffing: Packing long lists of keywords and nothing else onto your site will get you penalized eventually by search engines. Learn how to find and place keywords and phrases the right way on your Web site with my article titled Learn Where And How To Put Keywords In Your Site Pages.
- Invisible text: This is putting lists of keywords in white text on a white background in hopes of attracting more search engine spiders. Again, not a good way to attract searchers or search engine crawlers.
- Doorway Pages: A doorway page is basically a “fake” page that the user will never see. It is purely for search engine spiders, and attempts to trick them into indexing the site higher. Read more about doorway pages.
- Spam: Automated posting of comments and forum posts with links embedded in them. Its a pain to be on the recieving end of these "bots."
Black Hat SEO is tempting; after all, these tricks actually do work, temporarily. They do end up getting sites higher search rankings; that is, until these same sites get banned for using unethical practices. It’s just not worth the risk. Use efficient search engine optimization techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like Black Hat SEO.
If I had one hundred pages available and the fingertips to do it, I can go on and on about the stories I have heard from people who have been ripped off. But I don’t and I won’t. Louisville Web Group doesn’t employ Black Hat SEO techniques. We get you found the honest way. So you don’t have to worry.
