Yes, I mean it!!! Don’t play dirty SEO tricks (AKA black hat techniques) with the big G to capture those sweet top spots. If you do so, then you’ll be nowhere on Google’s search result again. I can substantiate my statement with a recent SEO scam that was published in NY Times. I am sure all of you must be aware of it.
The retail giant JCPenney was identified for implementing black hat SEO techniques that ideally dominated the top spots for most of the umbrella phrases like dresses, bedding, area rugs, and more. So, how did they make their way to the top? The company was getting its SEO done through a third-party vendor who allegedly topped the Google results by getting backlinks from websites which were irrelevant to JCPenney or any of its pages. Though JCpenney said that they did not authorize this campaign as this is against their natural search policies, at the end of the day it was they (JCPenney) who had to suffer. For more info you can visit here…
Generally speaking, to gain top position on Google a site must have…
- Good site architecture - Crawler friendly site for easy crawling and indexing
- Relevant content – Information rich and useful content fortified with words, users type to find sites/pages-
- Quality backlinks – A link from a site is considered as a vote for a linked site. Ideally, it has to be relevant and trustworthy.
These techniques are obvious white hat practices and an ethical way of conducting search engine optimization, and it definitely takes time to yield result. While on the other hand, the so called black hat techniques will get you a quick result, but only for a short time. Black hat techniques involve paid links, page cloaking, keyword spamming, doorway pages, content spamming, hidden text, etc. These techniques are illegitimate and are regarded as dirty tricks which basically spam the search result and violate the search engine guidelines.
Remember, Google is very much concerned about its search result because they want to display the most relevant sites/pages when their users use their service. They will never tolerate if a site is found employing questionable SEO tactics that have spoiled their search result.
If you or your SEO vendor is using any of the black hat techniques that I mentioned above, then be on high alert, who knows you could be the next victim of Google.
How to identify black hat SEO techniques?
- Ask your SEO vendor to disclose their monthly SEO activities/strategies. Don’t get fooled by SEO companies that claim to bring you on top in short time, get xx no. of backlinks for x$, etc. Be aware of SEO scams and false promises.
- Check your website’s backlink profile. To do this, you can use opensiteexplorer
- Check if your site has been loaded with hidden content
- Check if a page has been created solely for targeting a specific search phrase
- Check if a page is getting redirected
- Check for excessive link exchanging from irrelevant sites
More on this in the next post…
27 comments:
It's also best to monitor the site's brand mentions through Google Alerts, to assure that everything is in good shape when it comes to the business' online reputation.
Tracking links being created for month will surely be a tedious task, perhaps it's also best to ask other experts to see if your current service provider is truly doing white-hat strategies.
One thing you missed out - make sure not to over do things at first. The engines will find it strange if you start getting a ton of links to your site, and then this cools down once you lose focus. Start small, be patient, and stay consistent :)
Ya! We need to avoid black hat techniques as it can harm the website. These are the things where there are no more efforts can be required but using natural ways which takes time but ultimately you got the good position in the search engine!
I agree with you, it's better to use natural SEO, so Google will be friendly with us, thank you for sharing
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Totally true. Google is so much smarter now in terms of tricks to manipulate the algo. Tide tested tactics such as syndicated content still work well, and acquired links is still a vital piece. In my humble opinion though the biggest factor is social media, as Google is likely using the social graph to distribute influence
This is all true, but does anyone else feel like we all keep repeating the mantra of "quality content, no spam, good links" over and over again because we hate to see the people who use dirty tricks doing so well and need to remind ourselves that we are doing the "right" thing? Sometimes it feels like an uphill battle against content farms and huge corporations with money to throw at search.
Mate you are 100% correct about this. I hired few seo guys to do my linkbuilding and guess what they were sending low quality links and instead of going higher in rankings i was non existent after a month. you have to be really careful with these seo people
The best thing that any e-commerce merchant can do is to invest in content. Quality content that affirms their band and credentials will not only improve their sales performance when visitors come on site but it will also do wonders for their search rankings.
3 things that I always try to keep in mind:
- Keep it relevant
- Keep it fresh
- Write for the reader not for a bot
If you dont know, how far you can go, buy some Websites and experiment with them. Google reacts rather elastic. Then take the results from the website that "survives" to your main domain. This works for sure.
So if we talk about "the mantra of "quality content, no spam, good links", let's mention one more "oriental" thing: karma.
So if you use black hat SEO techniques, you'll definitely spoil your karma, so let's stay clean)
Thanks so much for the post. It's really true what your saying here and more people need to hear it. Google is much more in depth than people think when it comes to identifying wrongful SEO use. It's nice to know that people like your self are out there trying to educate. It's extremely easy for a new website owner to get wrapped up in wrongful activity.
I have seen a live example of it. mypharmastore is the website which cannot be found in google search results.
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I find your site so interesting and helpful. I hope I have much time each day to drop by and check your site for recent post. By the way I really appreciate the effort for sharing this.. Thank you..
@James
agree with James. You need to keep consistency with your link building. Also avoid paying for links off third parties, if google finds out they will ban you!
good post.... it is giving suggestions about how content should be, and how SEO activities should be. its informative post.
Good point @Zippy Cart, but the possibility of getting punished by Google is just too daunting. It seems like no one can outsmart them forever. Just ask Yahoo!
very true! i feel the google bot is smarter than i'll ever be. if i even THINK of doing black hat seo, google will already detect it.
Good advice, but it is not the issue I hear from others with e-commerce sites: How do I keep the ever hungrier Panda from mistaking me for a content farm / this weeks favorite target? There's no shortage of sites that have eaten the ban-hammer and that have done nothing black or even gray-hat with their SEO.
Of course Google want the best results, to stay at the top of the game, so we all have to do the best we can at so-called "white hat" techniques. But How much "black hat" is too much?
Well that sounds perfect. But what if there are competitors who wants to pull you down and posts backlinks of your website from many irrelevant sites? That i feel is not legally an action that can be taken by google. Instead they have to tune in their crawlers to rank only pages that give quality backlinks and ignore other backlinks. Does it make sense? As of now i feel JCP has been intelligent enough to find a flaw in google crawler and ranking system - to Search engine optimize their website.
never go black hat it's the worst thing you can do for your website. It can irreversibly destroy your reputation
people don't get that our area is getting harder every year. google gets smarter and sophisticated.
the only way to success is hard high quality work and true added value to your surfers. i am tired of seeing people get damaged by amateur companies that try to make shortcuts !
there is no question of right and wrong here. there is simply SEO or nonsense-SEO.
one is getting you to good stable results for your brand and the other gets you out of google.
choose your side. after years i still see that all of the people who do tricks don't last long at the top.
wake up people!
Thanks for sharing.
There is a plethroa of black hat stuff out there that many people use. Have to be careful. Read Googles guidelines. It's pretty simple really. You can purchase softwre for under $10 that promises everything. Beware.
Playing dirty Tricks is always equivalent to nothing.I really learn a lot on this :)
Google has its way of tracking non-sense, so you better watch out. It's also helpful for online users to have quality websites to look at.
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