March 27th, 2010 by Susie

We have mentioned in our other blog articles the possibility of your site being penalised by search engines, in the event of your use of unethical, otherwise known as ‘black hat’ search engine optimisation techniques in order to propel your website up the search engine rankings for your chosen keywords. This penalty system exists to maximise the relevance of search results, which entails minimising instances where websites are, instead of serving the human user with relevant and high quality content, simply slavishly trying to please search engine spiders with such techniques as cloaking, keyword stuffing and link farms. It is massively important, then, that your own site abides by these ‘rules of the road’.

That said, many SEO newcomers in particular become unnecessarily anxious about these requirements. Indeed, take penalties out of the equation and SEO seems like a simple enough and, at worst, unintimidating process: you just construct and organise your site with links and keywords in a way that convinces search engines that yours should be the one that they rank highest in their result pages whenever a target user searches online. With penalties thrown in as a possibility, it can seem that any tactic to get your site ahead of the rest that seems remotely bold or different could potentially violate the stringent rules of an impersonal, uncompromising search engine.

It is, however, not very helpful to think of search engine optimisation in this adversarial way. No search engine penalty is terminal: the fact that companies like ours exist is proof enough that search engine optimization often requires a great amount of specialist expertise and takes a decent amount of learning for the uninitiated newcomer. The existence of ‘grey hat’ SEO, which is the term for techniques that can be used in both an ethical or unethical way, helps to show that webmasters can, in any case, inadvertently end up with their websites being penalised by the search engines. Certainly, unlikely but possible penalties are no reason for you to not optimise your site. Ethical SEO services are available to help you stay on the right path.

Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge and respect that penalties exist for a reason. Bad faith SEO does exist, and it costs companies money every year. Many who deliberately use ‘black hat’ techniques may even see their site temporarily benefitting in the rankings. Nonetheless, once such offenders’ actions have been discovered and punished, only they can accept responsibility. While it is possible, if unusual, for a website to get thrown off the index for up to a year, which most companies simply can’t afford, such time periods are only reflective of the lengths to which the search engines need to go to sufficiently deter wrong-doers. Indeed, if you do get penalised, it does not mark the permanent end of a good relationship with the search engines, and you can ask our team for more help and advice on recovery.

Consult us today for advice on how to avoid search engine penalties with a variety of ethical SEO tools and services, while also greatly improving your website’s search engine performances.

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