So, you’re getting a high volume of traffic to your website, you’re page ranking is on the up and this has all happened within a month of hiring you’re SEO company. Wow! They’re amazing; I take my hat off to them. Actually maybe I don’t… I smell a rat. I think your SEO company maybe be wearing the black hat.

The different techniques that you choose to adopt when optimising your website to improve its search engine ranking are where you choose which hat you are going to wear; Black or White?

Stephanie Matsuoka (2014) describes Black Hat SEO as a “quick fix method” that is enriched with techniques to trick and fool search engines that usually lead to only temporary results. Duk, Bjelbork and Carapina (2013) expand on this “quick fix method” supporting that bad SEO practice is a promise of high ranking and number of clicks, in a short period of time… Does this sound familiar?

Well, what needs to be taken into consideration is how valuable that one click is. If the customer is misled and they click on the website and don’t find what they are looking for, what are they going to do? Click straight back off the website! What does this do? It increases your website bounce rate and that doesn’t look good for any website and actually that is the least if your problems.

When practising black hat SEO, what you need to be more worried about is the fact that Google or any search engine can completely de-index your website, yes… banish your website from all search engine page results!

So, it is important that you are in know when it comes to black hat SEO;

• Key Word Stuffing – Can simply be a list of key words in a footer or area of a page and is also recognised when content is packed with keywords and therefore doesn’t read naturally.

Example: We sell custom pig skin handbags. Our custom pig skin handbags are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom pig skin handbag, please contact our custom pig skin handbag specialists at custom.pig.skin.handbag@stupidexample.com

(Please note this is only an example – no pigs were harmed in the writing of this blog, but I think you get the keyword stuffing part, right?)

• Link Farms – Can be in the form of paid links whereby you offer payment in return for links to your website. Some naughty SEO-ers even go to the extent of creating new sites with the sole purpose to create a link back to the main site. Both ways, these links are usually unrelated and of course, search engines do not like this!

Download your backlinks from Google Webmaster Tools or SEOMoz, now if you see links from non-relevant sites, they are usually paid links and nine times out of ten, the link to your website in the content of this article (the link usually comes from a blog i.e.-  builderboylife.blogspot.com) will be a load of nonsense.

Example: Brick laying is not that hard, just make sure you have cement, the correct amount of bricks and a custom pig skin handbag.

• Invisible text – This kind of speaks for itself; placing text the same colour as your background to trick the search engines and of course we humans don’t pick up on it.

• Cloaking & Doorway Pages – This is simply showing two different versions of your website; one to your users / visitors and another to the search engines which is usually a keyword stuffed page. Similar to this the doorway page features a list of key words whereby after a minute or so both the users / visitors and the search engine are redirected to another page which has the actual content that you as a webmaster wants users to see.

Be aware people – both of these are classed as spamdexing! Oh and just so you know – Google released the almighty Panda back in February 2011 that eats sites with spam and poor content for breakfast! If you have the time, I suggest you read a little more about the Google Panda here.

(Source adapted from Yu, 2014)

 Now, don’t think “oh I can get away with it” because you can’t – no matter how big or small a company, Google will look for you, Google will find you and Google will deindex you (Yes, Taken is one of my favourite movies). In fact BMW, the German car manufacturer, were one of the many that thought they could get away with it and they learnt the hard way…

Back in 2006, Google blacklisted BMW, removing them entirely from their search engine page results (BBC, 2006). Why? Simple – they used doorway pages to improve their ranking and this is of course going against Google’s guidelines;

“Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as ‘cloaking'”

So folks, as you can see it doesn’t matter who you are, if you don’t abide by the rules, you will suffer the consequences. If you are interested to know more about the BMW ‘death penalty’ click here.

I hope now you can understand why it is not worth cutting the corners to improve your ranking and volume of traffic, after all they are just numbers and you need to keep in mind that when it comes to SEO it is always quality over quantity. On that note, I feel my work here is done and I leave you with this – SAY NO TO BLACK HAT SEO!

References:

BBC (2006). ‘BMW given Google ‘death penalty’. [Online] <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/4685750.stm> [accessed 23 April]

Duk,S.,  Bjelbork, D. & Carapina, M.  (2013) ‘SEO in e-commerce: balancing between white and black hat methods’. Information & Communication Technology Electronics & Microelectronics (MIPRO), [Online] 36th International Convention (20-24 May). <http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6596289> [accessed 22 April 2015]

Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.co.uk/en/uk/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Matsuoka, S. (2014) ‘Black Hat vs. White Hat: Do You Know the Difference?’. [Online] <https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141010205518-247571609-black-hat-vs-white-hat-do-you-know-the-difference> [accessed 20 April 2014]

Yu, J. (2014) ‘How Google’s Latest “Panda” Algorithm Should Change Your Content Strategy’. [Online] <http://marketingland.com/panda-4-1-changes-content-performance-strategy-103850> [accessed 22 April 2015]