If you have a website you've probably heard of blackhat SEO tactics, an optimization method to help your site climb the all-important rankings of the major search engines. While there is nothing actually illegal in blackhat SEO, it's doomed to fail every time, regardless of what the peddlers and proponents of the technique tell you. This is something I explain to clients of mine when putting together a PR campaign, and I won't work with any that wish to use blackhat SEO.

What is Blackhat SEO?
There are two main forms of search engine optimization - whitehat SEO and blackhat SEO. Whitehat SEO tactics are the everyday optimization techniques that reputable companies, SEO specialists and Internet marketers use to make their website(s) more visible to the search engines. Keyword placement; quality backlinks; blogging; social networking; meta tag optimization - they're all ethical ways to optimize a website, which in turn helps that site climb the all-important Google rankings and similar.

Blackhat SEO techniques, on the other hand, are very dubious, largely unethical methods to make your website look more popular than it is. These include spamming; building thousands of irrelevant backlinks; cloaking keyword-stuffed pages so they don't show up on search engine spider indexes, but do contribute to keyword searching; duplicate content and more. Blackhat SEO is very popular with unethical Internet marketers that set up hundreds of automated websites to sell you something that you probably don't need, and more than likely doesn't work.

Blackhat SEO Saves Money - A Fallacy
Many "SEO specialists" that recommend using blackhat SEO techniques will usually try and tell you that it's worth it because it saves you money. They'll try and convince you that building and promoting a blackhat SEO website costs a lot less money that what you would spend on traditional SEO methods. This is a crock.

While you can certainly set up a website free of charge today, thanks to the likes of Wordpress and SynthaSite, and you can then stuff hundreds of keywords onto that site to try and get it noticed, it'll only be a short-term gain. Google and the other search engines are constantly updating their search engine algorithms to combat blackhat SEO techniques, and websites found using these methods will be blacklisted by Google.

Now, considering that Google is the most popular search engine on the planet, having your business blacklisted because of unethical search engine techniques is quite possibly the worst thing that can happen to you. Potential customers won't be able to find you through keyword searches, leaving your competition to clean up, and businesses won't want to be associated with you for fear of being connected to your site. Basically, you'll be killing your business online.

So, is blackhat SEO really worth it? Definitely not - after all, you wouldn't tolerate an employee who continued to cause you problems and money, would you? Instead, use tried and tested search engine optimization methods and leave blackhat SEO to the fast-forgotten crowd.

About the Author

Danny Brown is the owner and Managing Director of Press Release PR, providing search engine optimized press releases and SEO-friendly web content for the commercial and consumer market. With a BA in English and a Certified Associate of Marketing degree, Danny now resides in Canada, where Press Release PR continues to draw plaudits and clients alike.

Labels: blackhat, blogs, seo, whitehat

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