SEO Blog

There’s sometimes an assumption that Black Hat SEO is dead and buried. The techniques have been ousted by the search engines and rendered useless. However, that doesn’t mean that people don’t keep trying.

Unscrupulous types will use Black Hat SEO to get quick gains. For example, if you have signed up to a dodgy SEO service that promises top Google rankings within a month, they might well deliver. But they will do so by damaging your site.

One technique is to build a link farm inter-connecting hundreds of unsuspecting sites. This will give you hundreds of new links, some of which might be reasonably strong, helping you leap up the rankings. Unfortunately this is against Google’s rules.

Once the link farm is discovered by the search engine crawlers, it will be black listed. Unfortunately, so too will all the sites connected. So whilst the Black Hat SEO scampers off with your money, you will be left with a site littered with illegal links and languishing in the search engines bad books.

But you might not do Black Hat SEO quite so callously. Sometimes it can be a complete accident.

Many people fall into the trap of thinking that all links are good. They set up a number of sites and start a ring of linking; as with the similar example above, this won’t work.

If you have a good site, then promote it on its own. Don’t waste your time building up secret networks. More likely than not, those who do this by mistake (and sometimes those who do it deliberately), will host all the sites on the same server, often under the same name. This of course gives the search engines all the information they need to show your wrong-doing. Goodbye rankings.

Sometimes people don’t just want the top ranking, but the whole first page of Google. Again, this isn’t going to work. Firstly it is hard enough to get one site to rank for a term, let alone five or six. Next, and most importantly, something will give you away.

Whether it’s the registered address, the server or content duplication, the search engines don’t need much to smell a rat. Again, the advice here is to steer clear and focus on getting your site up to speed. Messing around trying to game the search engine rankings will almost always end in failure, so save yourself the bother.

Ethical SEO might not be quite as edgy or high risk as Black Hat techniques, but ultimately they should provide you with the better long-term benefits. You can’t treat the search engines as idiots. They are highly intelligent programs designed to weed out wrong doers. If you think you’re the first to find the short-cut to success, sadly you’re sorely mistaken.

So many people have had the brainwave to create hundreds of satellite sites, pay for links or just submit a load of duplicate websites; almost all of them have suffered as a consequence. Of course, the principle behind them is always sound – links are good, so I’ll just create them myself – but Google have seen this same thing time and time again.

You might get away with it for a while; but, more likely than not, one day your Black Hat SEO work will come back to haunt you.