June 29th, 2010 by Mike

It’s not always possible to spot a bad SEO company. Even if you’re on the lookout for the signs that indicate a company is not as up-to-standard as they should be, it’s possible for people to slip under your radar. Bad SEO does sometimes happen to innocent websites, leaving their owners wondering what to do to repair things.

Bad SEO, or black hat SEO, can have a long-term effect on a site. If someone has managed to get into your pages and place hidden text or other frowned-upon techniques, you might not know about it until your ranking takes a dive. Once that happens, the damage has to be found and repaired before your site can even be submitted for re-inclusion. After that, there is still a wait for your rankings to go back up again.

Why does black hat SEO have this effect?

Black hat optimisation techniques have this effect because they deliberately break the rules. When the search engines eventually pick up on this rule-breaking, they punish the site that features the bad techniques – in other words, you are the one who has to deal with the outcome.

The time lag comes from the short-term effectiveness of black hat SEO techniques. For example, paying for or hacking into thousands of good-quality links can artificially boost your link profile. This can convince the search engine algorithm that your site is suddenly popular. Over time, however, as the algorithm investigates the origin of these links, their real nature may be revealed. If it is, the search engine may either automatically filter out your page, or a harsher penalty may be imposed.

Not all rankings drops are necessarily the result of black hat SEO. The term ‘black hat’ indicates a deliberate misuse of optimisation techniques. While there are companies out there that use techniques in this way to produce swift results, enabling them to lure clients in and be gone before the rankings drop occurs, sites can also be subject to simple bad SEO. It might be that a helpful but misguided staff member has performed some optimisation on your site, or that an uninformed web designer has offered to include some search engine optimisation techniques in their design. Bad SEO can come from well-meaning people, but it doesn’t make things easier to repair.

Discovering the problem is half the solution

The hardest part of recovering from the effects of bad SEO is figuring out what went wrong in the first place. The search engines don’t send an email informing you of your infraction. In fact, even discovering that something is wrong can be tricky.

Once you realise that something has gone wrong, it’s important to check through your site carefully. If you’re really stuck, it can be well worthwhile getting a search engine optimization expert in, and you can discuss this with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. Tracking down the problem can require extremely close examination of all your pages. Once you discover the problem, it’s a matter of fixing it and applying to the search engines for re-inclusion.

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