Black Hat Practices are the Black Plague of SEO

Some SEO experts will do anything possible to improve their website’s rankings-- including dishonest practices known as “black hat” SEO. Black hat SEO is the practice of improving your website’s rankings by violating a search engine’s terms of service. Although these practices may be successful in improving rankings in the short term, unethically violating rules will result in severe consequences for your site in the long run.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t strategize to improve your SEO as long as you abide by the search engine’s terms. Google and other search engines want your site to be seen by viewers in Utah and across the globe, and intelligently utilizing tactics in order to increase your visibility is strongly supported.

From a business perspective, black hat SEO practices should always be avoided. These strategies try to fool search engines into thinking that sites are more popular and valuable than they really are. Just as marshals patrolled the deserts of Utah in old Wild West films, search engines comb through the tactics people use to improve their rankings. If caught using black hat SEO, companies not only face penalties that are very time-consuming but they also could end up spending a lot of money to correct their errors.

In order to boost your SEO, there are many tactics to avoid that could cause your website to be penalized. Keyword stuffing is the number one crime in SEO tactics. Unnaturally placing keywords makes the information difficult for people to read and causes them to abandon your site and move on to the next.

Inbound links are a great way to improve your page’s SEO. The more links to your page, the more relevant your content is. However, these links must be natural. If the source to your page is not natural or was purchased, it will have a negative impact on your SEO. For example, linking a Utah ski resort to a window manufacturer’s site doesn’t make sense to readers or search engines.

Hidden text is a black hat tactic that configures text to be either unreadable or invisible to readers but visible to search engines. These methods include shrinking the font to a size zero, making the text and background white or attaching a link to a single character.

Although black hat SEO tactics improve your rankings in the short term, the penalties are not worth the benefits. Reaching viewers in Utah and across the country will come naturally as long as your tactics are honest and thoughtfully strategized.