Over the past month I have run into issues at least a dozen issues where both local and national search engine optimization agency’s have been performing unethical or BlackHat SEO tactics. In a recent Blog post “What does White Water Rafting and SEO have in common,” I talked about local SEOs who were doing everything from shady domain and link farms to the extent of signing up with download sites, creating a user name for keyword they want to rank for and offering bogus toolbar downloads just to get a little link love.
Several weeks back I spoke to an Advertising agency who’s “Search Engine Optimizer” hired left them with some pretty obvious and severe penalties. Why do SEOs get into BlackHat SEO anyway?
First – it’s easy to get rankings by cheating. Like I said above even I have played around with BlackHat techniques at some point and have realized there needs to be some ethics. Second it’s an obvious lack of education in some cases. Specifically, the attorney I spoke to hired a SEO who was not experienced and were basing their practices on outdated techniques that are considered black or grayhat seo now.
Over SEOs brief history Search Engine Optimization has gotten a bad rap and its mainly because of SEOs who knowingly perform unethical SEO tactics who in many cases have some sort of duplicity, malicious intent, or trickery behind their motives.
Never hire an SEO if…
- you’ve met via a piece of email spam
- who has made ridiculous outlandish promises “Number 1 Guaranteed Google Placement”
Another red flag is to avoid SEOs who claim top positions for widely obscure phrases that no one would ever search. Why pay for this?
What are some easy ways to identify a whitehat SEO?
- Whitehat SEOs will be more than willing to explain clearly how he/she intends to help your website rank.
- Whitehat SEOs will ensure that the site is designed primarily for the end users.
Here are some typical Blackhat SEO tactics:
- Doorway Pages are intended to show up in search results with the intention of not to be seen by end users. They are websites or pages that are designed to immediately redirect to the client’s web page. This is a direct violation of Google Quality Guidelines.
- Cloaking websites is creating a keyword rich website for search engines. It could be serving keyword rich text to search engines and in return hiding that same text from end users eyes. This violates search engine guidelines in many ways including not designing websites for search engines rather than end users.
Last but not least… Don’t be afraid to ask what your money is paying for- it’s your money! Don’t feel bad about wanting to know what you are paying for and that your investment is sound.
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