March 15th, 2010 by Susie

As soon as the search engines close one loophole, unethical ‘black hat’ SEO providers find a new trick, and the cycle continues. It’s much harder to artificially push a website up the search rankings these days, because most of the obvious trickery has been dealt with, but now and again someone will find something that gives a quick boost to their websites.

But the search engines are watching out for sudden changes in rankings and traffic. Anyone shooting upwards is going to come under some pretty close scrutiny, and if they’ve been using unethical SEO to get there, they can expect heavy penalties and even complete bans. What companies that pay black hat SEO service providers get (if they’re lucky) is a quick spike in traffic, before Google monitoring catches up and the search rankings of the shady site plummet. Don’t be tempted!

Unsolicited email offers of thousands of links are still common, amazingly enough. It’s an obvious ruse and it has been years since this ‘link spamming’ was an effective technique. Less malicious but usually no more effective are emails from other site owners offering a ‘link swap’. Be very careful about who you link to! Search engine optimization is something you should take seriously – as is link building to high quality partners.

So, what are these clever tricks modern black hat SEO companies are offering? They could be as simple as spiking the page with content users don’t see, by placing text with the same colour as the background. That way people viewing the page don’t notice the spammy, keyword stuffed bits. It’s a little more complicated, but with some fancy html, the content on a Black Hat SEO page might not actually be hosted on the url you see at all. It could be held in a frame and imported from somewhere completely different.

You might also be offered links from a site with very high PageRank and excellent authority, for a price of course. The email will contain a link to an SEO tool for evaluating site authority (and probably a well established and useful one) for that page, and it might look very good. But what you’re looking at is probably a redirect and shows results for a completely different page, because the site offering the link is not so great after all. Always be sceptical about SEO services offered by a company that has no results themselves.

We offer ethical SEO services only- our hat is a nice bright white. We’re a serious company in SEO for the long haul, and we know that using quick and dirty tricks isn’t going to help the long term position of our business any more than they will help yours. Our focus is on building site value and quality, and using social media optimisation and the best possible content practices to bring our client’s websites to the best possible position, and keep them there. And don’t worry- us white hats have plenty of tricks of our own!

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