How to Identify Black Hat SEO

For example, posting linked comments on related blogs isn't considered very problematic, but using software to submit huge quantities of identical or irrelevant comments is definitely viewed as a Black Hat technique.

White Hat SEO methods, if done properly, can actually product the best long-term outcome and create a greater impact on the web in general. Several once-common Black Hat techniques have fallen into disuse after search engines successfully developed ways to detect them.

Move to the top of the search results pages, increase your visibility, drive traffic to your site--with these promises, it is easy to understand why many companies are tempted to avail of the services of a search engine marketing company that use optimization techniques search engines like Google and Yahoo! consider illegal.

Known as Black Hat SEO, these methods include adding hidden texts, creating doorway pages (or, as Google defined them "pages created just for search engines"), key word stuffing (i.e., bombarding your content with too much keywords and phrases), using popular but irrelevant keywords and participating in link farms.

Despite the potential benefits they can provide you, however, Black Hat SEO should be avoided like a plague.

First of all, the search engines could drop your rankings so low that even the most diligent of searchers would have a hard time finding your site. And a lowered ranking, as any business whose web site has been penalized can tell you, is never a good thing. Kinderstart, a parenting web site for example, experienced a 70% decline in traffic and 80% revenue decrease after Google penalized the site in March 2005 for allegedly using Black Hat SEO techniques.

And if you think getting your ranks lowered is bad enough, then read this: in some cases, the search engines even ban sites and remove them from their index list--this means that, unless you're able to successfully appeal your case, your site will never appear on search engine results page ever again. One example is the case of RICOH Germany. The German web site of the Japanese office-products manufacturer was "de-listed" by Google after the search engine discovered the site using spam techniques to bolster its rankings (the site has been re-listed after the company apologized and its webmaster made the modifications Google demanded).

If you're really unlucky, aside from getting your site removed from the list, you might also suffer from the same embarrassing fate of BMW.de. While the banning of web sites are never really announced (even to the company that owns it), Google's engineer Mike Cutts announced on his blog the removal of BMW.de's site from the search engine's index and even detailed the violations the web site committed. As their very name signifies, their dark ways and objectives lie in promoting web pages and their ranks and they do only care for quick improvement, however transitory their existence may be.

Off-Page Analyses: Off-page SEO jobs such as link building, directory submission, article submission, blog commenting and link exchanges, video submission and the likes do also take a considerable period of time for improving page ranks of a website when all ethics are duly followed by a SEO Company. But the scene tells another story. Most of the SEO companies do not stick to the norms. They prefer dark ways. Indiscriminate exchanges of links and the likes to websites of alien kind and software-driven cunning submission of links can dredge the litany of lapses within a short time span.