Search engine engineers face a constant battle: trying to keep up with webmasters who are always looking for ways to trick the system. This ongoing cat-and-mouse game is known as “Black Hat SEO.”
On the other hand, SEO done by honest and skilled professionals is called “White Hat SEO.” A good SEO professional can only promise to optimize your site to achieve a higher ranking in search engines. Credible professionals won’t promise specific results or sell rankings.
Be wary of SEO professionals who:
- Guarantee a specific ranking.
- Don’t distinguish between search results and paid ads.
- Generate traffic from fake search engines.
- Use doorway pages with hidden redirects to link to other clients’ sites.
- Sell keywords.
- Own “shadow domains” that redirect visitors to another site.
- Don’t have their own website listed on Google or have had domains banned by Google.
- Use multiple aliases or false WHOIS information.
- Can’t show you well-ranked pages they’ve optimized.
- Offer automated mass submissions to search engines. This violates Google’s Terms of Service and can get your site banned.
10 Examples of Black Hat Tactics
- Hiding text using white text on a white background.
- Using CSS to hide text (e.g., making it one pixel).
- Placing text behind an image.
- Setting font size to zero.
- Disguising links as punctuation, like a comma.
- Using unauthorized redirects or cloaking to hide the page’s true content.
- Showing search engines an HTML page while displaying a Flash page to visitors.
- Presenting different content to search engines and visitors.
- Using irrelevant keywords that don’t match the page content.
- Duplicating content across multiple pages, on or off the site.
Want to learn more about how to avoid these pitfalls and improve your website’s organic search ranking? Contact us today for a free consultation!
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