SEO Scams & Black Hat SEO Tactics
Protect yourself against SEO scams & Black Hat practices: Learn what to look out for.
SEO Scams and Black Hat SEO: Giving Legitimate SEO a Bad Name
If you have sought the advice or retained the services of a reputable SEO company, you probably won't need convincing that search engine optimization is fundamental to any online marketing endeavor. The SEO profession, however, is often the subject of criticism with allegations that it is nothing more than a fabricated industry centered around the manipulation of search engine results with underhanded tactics. The use of such "black hat" techniques to increase a client's web site ranking can have severe consequences and could even result in delisting from the major search engines. Unfortunately, many website owners desperate to generate web traffic fall victim to so called SEO experts offering instant, overnight SEO success. Although these snake oil salesmen represent only a small percentage of SEO professionals, their unethical business practices draw considerable criticism to the entire industry.
Search Engine Optimization Scams & Black Hat SEO
At Zizinya, we believe that the first step is to educate our visitors about the nature of these SEO scams and black hat seo tactics. A well informed consumer will be better equipped to differentiate between a Black Hat SEO practicioner and an ethical, hard working SEO professional.
A legitimate SEO professional understands that the search engine optimization process is sophisticated and complex, and a successful campaign will take months- and in some cases years- for optimal search engine placement results.
Be cautious of a search engine optimization company offering:
Unrealistic Guarantees
"Guaranteed placement within Google's top ten organic rankings by tomorrow!" or "Guaranteed first place ranking on Google for any keyword!"
SEO is a perpetual process that does not happen overnight. Anyone offering a guarantee of top ten or first page placement in a short period of time is more than likely not capable of doing so.
The keywords relevant to some topics are much more competitive than others and can be extremely difficult to place for. Without knowing the specific keywords for a campaign it would be impossible to guarantee first place ranking - in any amount of time.
cloaking
Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization technique that is used to deceive search engines in hopes of a better ranking. When a search engine spider arrives at a site, it's IP address is used to trigger the presentation of different content than that which an internet browser would see.
Consider the following example:
A graphic heavy website that lacked content and consequently performed poorly in the search engine results would be a good candidate for cloaking. The website owner would create numerous content rich pages that are not visible to anyone browsing the site. Using IP address identification, a script residing on the web site server would determine when a spider arrived at the site and present it with the normally invisible content.
Cloaking is considered to be a violation of all major search engine guidelines and consequently sites are delisted when the practice is discovered.
Search engine Submission Services
Not all submission services need be avoided. Many web sites offer manual submission of your web site to a relevant directory that will be approved by a human being. This is not only permissable, it's considered a good SEO technique.
However, a service offering "Submission of your website to 1500 directories for $24.99" should be avoided at all costs. Repeated, multiple directory submission - especially to sites that are not relevant to yours- is considered spam and is in violation of the guidelines for most of the search engines, and will result in penalties or delisting.
Optimization Software and Keyword Stuffing
Optimization applications attempt to manipulate indexing or enhance domain keyword saturation by employing machine generated web pages stuffed with keywords. The result is a web site full of long paragraphs of garbled text with numerous, repeated strings of keywords or phrases.
These pages are not readable to web site visitors and are not popular with the search engines either. Search engine algorithms will determine the keyword density of a web page, and the overuse of a particular key word or phrase will be penalized.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are web pages that are created to spam the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular keywords or phrases with the purpose of manipulating search engine results.
Consider the following example:
A site selling widgets isn't getting the web traffic it wants due to a lack of good content optimization. The site owner will create a new page and fill it with numerous keywords and phrases that he thinks potential customers are searching with. The use of doorway pages is strictly prohibited by the seacrh engines and discovery of their use will result in delisting.
Link Farms
A link farm is a group of websites on the internet that all link to every other website in the group. The purpose is to immediately increase a website's link popularity by joining the group and acquiring numerous reciprocal links.
Search Engine algorithms can detect this in a number of ways. When a search engine spider indexes these "link farms" they deem them bad neighborhoods and penalize anyone linking to them.
Additionally, the algorithms will evaluate all the sites that link to yours, and if they determine that they are not relevant to your subject matter you will be penalized for that as well.
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