March 29, 2020

Illegal and Dangerous Internet SEO practices

Search Engine Optimization and Marketing (SEO and SEM) is growing astronomically as Google’s search business is estimated to topple all kinds of growth records set by the world’s other great monopoly, Microsoft. What luck right? The thing is though, the industry has some shady practitioners you need to be aware of while shopping around for SEO/SEM services. Imagine this scenario: Let’s say you hire a self-proclaimed “SEO King” who offers dirt cheap consulting rates, and promises reasonable results. He goes in and…

Search Engine Optimization and Marketing (SEO and SEM) is growing astronomically as Google’s search business is estimated to topple all kinds of growth records set by the world’s other great monopoly, Microsoft. What luck right?

The thing is though, the industry has some shady practitioners you need to be aware of while shopping around for SEO/SEM services.

Imagine this scenario:
Let’s say you hire a self-proclaimed “SEO King” who offers dirt cheap consulting rates, and promises reasonable results. He goes in and ‘optimizes’ your site, everything runs smoothly, and your page is listed at the top before you know it. Wow, it would seem like you got a good deal, a great one in fact.

Three days later, your check your inbox and find an email from Google’s Security Department notifying you that your page has been banned for engaging in a lengthy list of red flag activities. This will cost you money and time to repair the damage, and that your “SEO consultant”, “King—whatever you want to call him at this point—has been blacklisted as well. How are you supposed to take that? Exactly.

That is because Google detests “black hat SEO” deeply, and will take extensive measures to ban or even shut down sites of perpetrators’ whether or not they did it willing. That is how seriously Google takes its search business. It cannot allow spammers to compromise the integrity of its brand and overall product, and must weed out unwanted, irrelevant, and just plain malicious sites.

If you don’t think it can be that bad to have your web site taken down for a couple of hours, remember the success of your online business depends on it.

Here’s a partial list of the high-alert web-defined “black hat practices” that you need to watch out for:

1) Keyword or Meta Tag Stuffing– Excessive repetition of a keyword on a page or part of a page’s HTML code in an attempt to gain a higher PageRank (or higher ranking in any search engine). However, search engines have largely eliminated the efficacy of this method as the algorithms evolve.

2) Spamdexing– involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system. Search engines have largely eliminated this method’s usefulness too.

3) Cloaking– Specific content is sent to the search engine spider that is different then what the user sees.
a. Doorway pages – A highly optimized web page whose purpose is to direct traffic to other pages using either a redirect method or merely by being full of links that direct you to these other web pages.

4) Invisible text – Text on a web page that is exactly or almost the same color as the background. Deceives the user look at the page into thinking they’re only looking at one thing. Deceives the search engine by manipulating keyword density and thus PageRank. It can be detected and will be penalized.

5) Link Farming – a link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group.
a. Blog Farming – similar in nature to link farms, but involve a group of blogs.

6) Spam Page – Basically a doorway page that is full of ads that a webmaster makes money off of if someone clicks on them.

7) Duplicate Content – Multiple versions of the same content that exist on different pages. Search engines are not always able to distinguish the originating source of content, so multiple copies could detract from the original source’s rankings.

These are some “black hat SEO” methods that are sometimes harder to catch by the search engine bots, but can be manually discovered.

8) Selling PageRank– If you have a high PR website, you sell links from your site to another for cash. Helping their site rank higher in Google and in turn, earning you higher PageRank and traffic.

9) Have a Robot Write Your Web Site – it can’t always be detected depending on how sophisticated the bot is, but chances are your users won’t find choppy and stilted content useful anyway.

These are just a few of the many black hat SEO methods discovered. As the search engines improve their algorithms, SEO experts will be forced to use white hat SEO methods.

Baytech’s Link to the SEO Industry

Baytech Web Design was officially incorporated in 2001, but its ties to SEO San Jose reach back as far as 1998 when its founders were involved in early forms of web development. We have followed the developments of the search engine community very closely since basically the beginning of Google, and understand what distinguishes black hat SEO and white hat SEO.

Our nearly a decade of experience is one of the primary motivations our clients choose us over competitors when thinking about going beyond basic web site design and development.

Our award winning team of designers, online marketing strategists, developers and copywriters have successfully managed hundreds of PPC campaigns and optimized web sites for search engines. Baytech stands by its promise to bring our clients to the forefront of their industry through increased online web presence and generate revenue and traffic within budget and timelines.
Call 1-800-913-9327 today to chat with one of our consultants about starting an SEO partnership.

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