Why Blackhat SEO doesn’t Pay

Back in the good old days of SEO you could “game” the system and with the use of a few sly techniques have your website appearing on the first page of Google in matter of weeks.  Thankfully those days are over, but this doesn’t mean that there aren’t thousands of website owners still using these techniques for some very short term gains.

Before the search engine algorithms became more sophisticated there were about a dozen well known “tricks” to get high rankings. Below I’ve explained three of the more prominent ones:

• Hidden text
• Basically you would place in text that was the same as the background colour of your website or place it in tiny font so the search engine robots could still read it but it wouldn’t affect the human user’s experience.  Mostly this text would be full of hundreds of keywords.  There are more advanced ways of doing this nowadays using cascading style sheets (CSS) but chances are those smart little robots will catch this relatively quickly.
  
  
• Duplicate Content
• Search engines don’t like to show duplicate results of the same content.  That’s why they try to determine where the original source is and strip the rest out of the results.  In the old days you could simply copy one page of your website and duplicate it hundreds of times and change a couple of words around to rank on different terms.  No more.
  
  
• Cloaking
• This one is a little more sophisticated and involves showing a different webpage to the search engine robots than the one you show your human users.  The search engine robot version would be keyword heavy and spammy while the human one would have great usability.  Again, do this and a gain a good chance of getting penalised or banned.   

Short Term Gain for Long Term Loss

Although most blackhat SEO techniques in their traditional forms are now obsolete, there are more advanced variations of some of them that still work in the short term.  They tend to provide you with either a very short term jump in rankings until the existing search engine algorithm spots the fraud and penalises you or delists you.  Or they work for a slightly longer amount of time until the search engine updates it’s algorithm to end your shady practise.

Punishment Worse than the Crime

Tricking the search engines really doesn’t pay.  Ranking on the first page of major search engines like Google for important terms can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars for your business a month.  The long term cost of not being able to return to the first page for months or even years can literally be deadly for your business.  The major search engines are all about returning the most relevant results in the shortest time possible. If you are trying to trick them to prove that you are the most relevant result even though you haven’t spent the time and money building your online brand or web user experience, than they have every right to come after you hard as their revenues depend on this search experience. 

Whitehat SEO

Whitehat SEO is about using your common sense.  Basically you want to create webpages that are content rich, user friendly and easily navigable.  A new user to your website should be able to easily spot exactly what you do, why you are good at it and how they can contact you or learn more.  If you do this then chances are you are going to make your website not only user friendly but also SEO robot friendly.  What a quality online marketing company can provide you is the experience and the man power to you use whitehat SEO to get higher value rankings, faster - ultimately providing you with a higher and quicker return on investment from your website.  Most importantly they can do what they do best and you can stick to running your business which is what you do best.