August 16th, 2010 by Dan
As Internet users, we’ve all become very tired of spamming. Cookies on screens and sites pages appearing from nowhere to offer us things we’d rather our children didn’t know about came to give the Internet a very bad name. This was a shame, because the information superhighway brought us a lot of good things too.
Modern, reputable and professional SEO services only advise on ethical ‘white hat’ methods of optimising sites, but it’s still possible to find short-sighted individuals who’ll advocate the opposite.
These days the search engines play a big part in our user experience by endeavouring to make the Internet useful and safe. They have developed ways of reacting to unethical practices, and protocols to deal with offenders. Anyone ruining the search experience for users can expect swift retribution, as Google and others seek to improve their service to customers in a competitive and growing market.
It’s sensible to wonder why anyone would still opt for unethical, or ‘black hat’ methods of SEO.
It tends to be publishers who aren’t willing to put the time and effort into bringing users to their pages legitimately. Creating a site that’s relevant and user-friendly is the basis of good SEO, but for those publishers unwilling to put some effort into that, there have been alternatives.
Unethical practises in SEO are not always as obvious as you might think. Modern, reputable and professional SEO services only advise on ethical ‘white hat’ methods of optimising sites, but it’s still possible to find short-sighted individuals who’ll advocate the opposite. It pays to know what some black hat practises are so that you know what to avoid. After all, if you’re unlucky enough to come across an unscrupulous SEO agency, you’ll need to recognise them for what they are before your reputation’s in tatters.
Keep our five tips in mind on what black hat practises to avoid.
1. Redirects and cookies. Directing a user away from his or her intended destination is underhand and disrespectful. Beware of any SEO methods that involve any form of this kind of practise. Similarly, advertising using cookies can be damaging to user’s computers and is an extremely serious infringement of modern accepted rules and guidelines.
2. Don’t go overboard with keywords. While the importance of keywords for optimisation cannot be understated, they can be overused. Featuring keywords at such a volume that it detracts from content is a black hat optimisation method. Overfilling pages with keywords used to be common, and they weren’t always keywords that reflected the content of a site. These days having too many keywords on pages will set alarm bells ringing for the search engines, and sites featuring an unreasonable amount can expect to be penalised. Remember that through being over enthusiastic when it comes to keywords you could push your site away from results pages, rather than getting it listed near the top.
3. Disguising text. It used to be fairly easy to disguise text on web pages. Simply make it the same colour as background and it could send signals about your site to search engines without being visible to human visitors to your site. In terms of search engine optimization tools, this is a very bad idea. Not only can text be made visible to users through the click of a mouse button, but search engines are wise to the practise. And if a publisher’s thinking of disguising keywords on a page, we’ve already told you that having too many can now be a bad thing.
4. Avoid cloaking. Cloaking involves the presentation of one set of pages to software sent by search engines, and another to users. In a similar way to redirects, this allows sites to be listed for what they are not and thus brings unwitting visitors. This practise should be avoided like the plague.
5. Stealing content. In a very general way there are a whole host of black hat methods that might seem harmless at first. While it may be easy to recognise the more obvious unethical methods, some can seem appealing to the overstretched publisher. Beware of ‘borrowing’ any form of content without permission, or of featuring any substandard items.
In conclusion, where SEO is concerned, it’s always the good guy that wins these days. Professional SEO services will inform you that penalties simply make black hat methods untenable for long-term gains. Market well, design well and employ a good SEO agency in order to prosper.
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