The Malice of Black Hats

Search Engine Optimizers (SEO) are a driving force in the world of internet marketing. One of the reasons for their prevalence in business is their ability to push businesses forward into new horizons. They can help small- and home-scale businesses improve their operations by tapping on the limitless possibilities provided by the internet. And with the prevalence of purchases and trading done online, SEO are at the forefront in channeling these revenue streams straight to their clients' sites.

However, due to the profitable nature of this industry, there are some SEO's who commit abuses and fail to provide services needed by these clients. Many of these are get rich-quick schemes that dupe unsuspecting clients into paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars for services that are sub-par or non-existent. Others employ aggressive and unethical SEO strategies that further hurt the reputation and search engine rankings of clients. Some of these tactics are keyword stuffing, hidden text and links, doorway and cloaked pages, link farming, and blog comment spam.

These strategies, commonly called 'black hat,' is a serious issue in the SEO community. Not only are businesses affected by these practices, other legitimate SEO companies also suffer from the negative image. And the negative effects on the industry are considerable. One black hat SEO is enough to damage the reputation of many other legitimate SEO's. Black hat tactics also damage the image of clients who used them because of the negative user experience it generates.

Black hat SEO are built not for humans but for the search engine spiders. They are designed to get better rankings fast on major search engines. The flip side is that they run the risk of being banned by the search engines once they are found out. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN believe that pages should be built for humans and provide them the information and data they are looking for. By using black hat techniques, SEO's build pages for the spiders and in turn give your visitors a bad experience.

It should be remembered that the purpose of SEO is to make websites not only 'search engine-friendly' but 'user-friendly' as well. People want to find the right sites with the right content and in such a way that will delight them and make them return. In other words, people should always matter.

Ignoring this simple rule would only make failure inevitable.