Internet Marketing, Web Design, SEO, Web 2.0 Optimization
SEO Tip # 21: What is Black Hat SEO?
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I would like to welcome you to my twenty-first SEO tip of the day; here I will discuss the meaning of “Black Hat” SEO.
As “search” has developed into a viable industry and as search engines have refined their algorithms in order to deliver best results what is acceptable (legal, or White Hat) and what is not acceptable (illegal or Black Hat) has changed and continues to change. Google employs armies of people whose job it is to improve their search results and part of whose job it is to discover deceptive SEO practices and penalize the sites that employ such Black Hat techniques. There are a number of SEO companies around that use Black Hat SEO techniques and that claim that you’ll never get caught; the reality is that you will get caught and when you do your site will get penalized and you will loose your business, while the company you hired will not be punished. There are a number of Black Hat SEO techniques that are common today and a number of SEO’s attempt to pass these off as “legal” or “low risk”, the reality is that although these may be low risk for the SEO company (who may loose you as a client if Google catches what they are doing) this can be very high risk for the client b/c they can loose their business. Despite what some of you might want I will not be going over examples of Black Hat SEO (for fear that you may be tempted to do some of these things), the one example of Black Hat SEO that I will provide is one that was recently in the news, the website of JCPenney (a venerable department store) was recently hit with a heavy penalty by Google for buying links (link buying is an example of a Black Hat practice) it seems that they were able to outsmart Google for months, b/c for months their product pages were raking #1 for various terms such as “baby furniture”… but eventually they got caught and now their entire site is being penalized. Another example of Google punishing a site for using Black Hat SEO is a recent case where Google punished overstock.com for paying college students to put links to the site on their blogs. In addition to buying links, excessive link trading is also seen as black hat (although trading a few links here and there will not cause you harm; although trading links is highly unlikely to help your overall SEO)
My advice to you is this, talk to your SEO company and ask them what they do to get results, and ask them if they use and Black Hat SEO techniques, you should only hire an SEO company that uses White Hat SEO.
If your site has been hit with a penalty by Google for using Black Hat SEO please contact us, we will work with you and Google to get your penalty lifted; we are a highly respected SEO firm that uses only White Hat SEO.
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This is an excellent point, and I’ll even concede that you may be correct (although I’m not sure of this) But the fact remains that it is not wise to use [any] black hat techniques! Sure, you may have some success for a brief time but at the end you have a pretty high probability of getting caught, penalized and loose some business. Additionally, if you as an SEO institute a black hat campaign for a clients’ site and that site gets penalized, you [the SEO] do not suffer from this, whereas the client may loose much money and business.
Our advice is to avoid using any SEO services that attempt to trick Google (after all Google is the largest private employer of Noble prize winning mathematicians and economists in the world and I doubt that any “SEO expert” that you hire can outsmart them)
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Many self proclaimed SEO experts continue to jump on that ever so cliche bandwagon, admonishing everyone willing to listen that “cloaking will get you banned” and, more importantly, tantamount to corporate suicide.
Do these self appointed Police deputies for Google really understand their absurd claim when they brandish with so much authority, “you will be banned” or are they simply repeating hype and myths which they have read elsewhere, without the slightest real world experience?
There is an obvious misconception, if not total lack of understanding as to how cloaking is implemented, which is echoed throughout the Google fearing SEO community by clueless SEOs.
So, what do they claim will actually get “banned”? Your core web site? Your cloaked domains? Or, as is clearly the case, do these doomsayers even know the difference between the two?
The confusion stems from not understanding the difference between a core web site and a cloaked web site.
Let’s clear up this widepread misconception right now.
Can your core web site get banned by Google for cloaking? If that was true, then your competitor would hire us to build thousands of cloaked domains and point them to your primary web site so that it would be banned from the Google SERPs! Think of the damage that would be done if that was at all true. Not a very likely scenario, is it?
Can Google penalize or “ban” your site because of the traffic that your Affiliates or other blackhat Internet Marketer sends your way? If that was true, you would well expect the world’s top 1000 web properties to disappear from Google’s indices, and where would that leave them, loss of advertising revenue aside?
Cloaked domains have nothing to do with your core web site. In fact, we build cloaked domains for clients on an entirely separate server which is completely independent from the client web site or server. This ensures total arms length association between your core web site and your traffic generating campaign.
This will avoid silly mistakes like that which caused BMW to be caught out by Google in 2006. BTW, notwithstanding the ongoing hype and who-ha since then, the fact remains that BMW was removed from the SERPs by Google for a total of only 36 hours. Duhh!
We construct cloaked domains on our high security servers, maintain daily SEO strategies and drive organic traffic to a client web site, squeeze page or other lead generation page.
These cloaked domains are simply a relevant shadow mirror of your core domain using highly optimized content pages. Optimized to give search engine spiders what they want to see.
So can you really have your “cloaked” domains (remember, cloaked domains are different from your core domain) banned for cloaking? The answer is yes – if, for example, the search engines’ staff have manually checked and compared your spider content with what you are actually serving your human visitors. In a worst case scenario a human editor may come along to check the matter out.
On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that this would happen unless some silly campaign build mistake has taken place. If a cloaking campaign is implemented professionally and with sound marketing techniques, your chances of being caught out are minimal.
In any case, we neatly avoid cloaked domain penalization by working with what we call “Shadow Domains™ ”, i.e. domains dedicated to giving the search engines appropriate spider fodder while redirecting human visitors at system level, without delay, to the main domain proper.
That way, should your cloaked domain really ever be penalized for cloaking – again, an extremely rare occurrence, all you will normally lose is that particular Shadow (cloaked) Domain. But then, all we do is register a new one for you and start from scratch. Simple as that. No big loss!
Clueless SEOs will have you believe that your core web site is what will be banned, but then that’s because these self proclaimed experts have never implemented a cloaking campaign, let alone come close to understanding the current advancements in cloaking technology, but instead beat to the drum of fear, uncertainty and doubt created by Google in the SEO jungle.