You don't have to be marketing online for long before you discover the dirty little word in our industry, "Black Hat SEO". Basically, these search engine optimization (SEO) methods are used to trick the search engines into giving webpages higher rankings than is really deserved.
Several examples of black hat SEO include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and bait and switch page swapping.
Keyword stuffing is quite common and you most likely have seen it many times while surfing the Web. These kind of pages are easy to recognize because you will see one phrase being overused. The whole idea is to stuff one or two keywords onto a page, even if it makes no sense at all.
Cloaking is when a webpage shows different content to the search engine spiders, than it does to human visitors. An example would be a website that tells the search engine spiders it is about weight loss, but human visitors are shown the actual content which could be an adult site.
Bait and switch is another sneaky way of tricking the search engines. The marketer will get the site to rank highly for one page of content, then switch it to something else.
Many people believe that only unethical marketers and spammers use black hate seo. However, this isn't entirely true. Many marketers who are well respected use these techniques, which again brings up the debate of it being unethical.
The people who use these methods will insist that there is nothing wrong with what they are doing. That the search engines don't create the marketing laws of right and wrong.
People who stick to the methods accepted by the search engines will argue that these methods are the same as cheating, and thus are unethical.
One thing that isn't in question, is that black hat methods can be very profitable.
I have personally decided not to ever use black hat SEO, as the possibility of having my sites de-indexed by the major search engines is not worth the risks. I've found that if you use white hat SEO and give the search engines what they want, they will return the favor.
I can't tell you what methods you should use to market your site, as many people have their own set of ethics and like to take risks. However, just remember that if you get caught, you will have no one to blame but yourself!
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