The Hat Your SEO Expert Wears Determines Your Online Success
The pursuit of higher ranking is one of the most passionate quests in Internet Marketing. It is no secret the higher you rank in search engines the more quality traffic will flow into your website. Poor rankings can kill a well-run business while being atop the chart on Google, Yahoo! and Bing can make even the most inferior product seem indispensable.
With this knowledge in hand, business owners clamor to find the secret sauce to quickly climb to the top of Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). The basic recipe is simple: find the right set of ingredients (keywords), mix properly into website copy, bake for a few months (approximate time it takes to attain meaningful rankings) and taste the fruits of victory in the form of a business boom.
However, the means of earning and maintaining the most lucrative rankings is much more troublesome. This causes some to fall prey to sneaky tacticians who often attempt to trick their clients in the same fashion they toil in chicanery with the mighty search engines.
This is the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), where symbols of the Wild West have always been front-and-center. Here Google, Yahoo! and Bing continue to lay down guidelines to halt undesirable behavior. Those who follow the letter of search engine laws are considered White Hats (the good guys). These are allies of the search engines who preach and practice the prescribed formula for SERP success. They practice straightforward, well-conceived and proven methodologies.
Meanwhile, those who continue to pursue top billing by any means necessary are Black Hats (the bad guys). These lawless rebels live their lives in a constant showdown with Search Engines. They view the pursuit of top billing as a conflict with the search engine algorithms where victory should be achieved by any means necessary. This often leaves them hiding in the shadows, hoping to survive and thrive without being noticed. They can win a few short-term battles along the way, but sooner or later their cover is blown and in the end the search engines win the war.
Once a search engine catches onto an illicit practice, it will shoot down your site with a significant drop in ranking or in some cases ban your site from the search engine altogether. Incidentally, both outcomes have the same impact, removing your product or service from the eyes of millions of would-be consumers. After all, being on page three or lower in search engines makes your business virtually invisible. The sentences from the search engine judges can lead to a long road back to any prominent placements. In fact, many companies are forced to scrap their existing websites, find a new URL and start from scratch. Often this is a quicker remedy than fixing a tarnished site’s legacy.
Can your business afford to be in the middle of a gunfight? Probably not. So here are a few common black hat techniques to avoid:
Cloaking – showing the search engine spider content to rank highly but display different content for human visitors.
Keyword Stuffing – cramming as many keywords—or repeating keyword phrases—onto a single page making it nearly unreadable for users. This goes for your code and meta data as well.
Hidden Text – hiding keywords in text or links that are invisible to the website visitor but can be seen by search engine spiders.
Doorway Pages – developing pages that are often no part of the regular site navigation because they contain worthless content that solely exist to rank well in the search engines.
Redirect Pages – misguiding users from the listing they clicked on to a different page altogether. Usually the page that earned the ranking is a keyword-stuffed landing page that quickly redirects to the real page.
Duplicate Content – setting up multiple websites with the same content or having several pages on a site with essentially the same information but different keywords inserted here and there.
Code swapping – gaining high SERP by submitting a text heavy version of a web page to the search engines, then once the page is well-ranked changing everything to be more desirable for human visitors. Keep in mind search engine spiders return to every page on a routine basis, especially when content is changed.
Bad Neighborhoods – linking is a critical component to SEO success, when done properly. However, links from unrelated sites or groups of sites with questionable practices can be detrimental. Be cautious and smart about who you are linking to and receiving links from.
Link Farms – grouping of sites that are all interlinked to one another with no informational relevancy, but simply in an effort to boost the link popularity of the sites.
SEO Spam – providing the web with countless worthless pages of meaningless content, created specifically for the purpose of ranking well in the engines. The listing looks great on a SERP, but once you land on the page there is just a bunch of ads or listings of other sites.
Some warning signs your SEO provider may wear a black hat include:
- Out of the blue solicitations claiming they saw a flaw on your site, which should be treated in the same manner as fad diets and ‘performance’ enhancement offers.
- A gaudy guarantee of top ranking in Google, Yahoo! or Bing. Especially if they do identify if the listing will be organic or paid.
- Speaks of “special relationships” with major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing. While some lower-tier and vertical search engines might have these backdoor deals, the real trusted sources of the searching masses do not.
- Fails to give you proper insight for their secret sauce. If you can’t see the logic in an SEO plan, odds are there isn’t one in place and search engines will realize shenanigans are going on.
- Forces you into linking to the SEO company itself or any of their client sites that is not relevant or desirable for your site to link to.
At Rhythm Interactive, we wear White Hats and believe this approach is best for our clients. Our team follows the best practices prescribed by the top search engines. For more information on what these search engines want, check out these links:
Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
