Black Hat SEO – yes or no?

There has been an ongoing webmaster debate about the use of black hat SEO techniques in search engine optimization pretty much since the first search engine was developed. Originally, many of the techniques seemed fairly inane – viz, hiding keywords in the same color text as the background so they were invisible to users but indexable by the search engines.

Then, along came more black hat SEO techniques such as spamdexing and keyword stuffing, which mainly led to non-qualified and uninterested traffic arriving on the website, so it is debatable who those methods benefited anyway.

Then there was cloaking, doorway pages, mirror sites, sitejacking and other similar methods, which meant creating pages which appeared differently to the search engines than to the users, or sending people to unrelated sites.....the list of black hat SEO techniques goes on and on, and new ones are added daily!

However, the question is: should you use these seemingly unethical techniques in order to attract traffic to your site? The answer is: Probably not, but it depends what the technique is.

It is very simple to arrive at the right answer, for you. Ask yourself before implementing a particular technique, does it feel like cheating?! If you feel it probably is, then it is likely the search engines may well view it the same way, if not now, but at some point in the future, and your use of it could cause untold problems. And if you cannot afford for your site to be de-indexed or barred from Google, Yahoo or any of the other major search engines, then the answer is really simple: definitely do not do it.

Spunky Jones.

1. Time And Effort is Required to Increase Web Traffic
2. Search Engine Optimization, Requires SEO Strategies To Succeed
3. Don’t Deceive the Search Engines to Achieve High Search Engine Rankings!
4. Keyword stuffing, is a blackhat SEO technique!
5. Understanding Search Engine Optimization
6. True or False, Is Google PageRank (PR) Dead?
7. Basic SEO Strategy Techniques for Improving, Search Engine Rankings!
8. LSI – Latent Semantic Indexing vs. SEO Optimization Techniques
9. The larger your site becomes, its potential increases to attract more visitors
10. Is your Web Design missing the SEO Factor?