Dangers of Unethical SEO Practices
August 5th, 2009 by Nick
Everybody wants to make money and the faster the better; that is simply human nature. How people go about making money as fast as possible can take many paths. The majority of people will work hard; they will follow all the best practices of search engine optimisation an deal ethically with all. Others unfortunately feel that the anonymity of the internet gives them carte blanche to use every possible underhanded tactic to get to the top of the SERPs.
In the olden days they used to tar and feather a cheater, set him on the back of a horse and chase him out of town. Today the same thing happens, but it is done through technology. SEO spamming is not an acceptable practice. Remember that if you deal with an SEO company that uses unethical practices; ignorance is no excuse.
Your website will be penalised and it can go as far as being banned by the search engines. The thing is; spamming tactics do get results, but only for a short while. Then the search engines put two and two together and your will find yourself in more trouble than those temporary SERPS listing is worth. Thus, if you or your SEO consultant uses spam tactics, it’s simple; your goose is cooked.
Keyword stuffing and hidden text
Keyword stuffing is annoying to human readers and the spiders will like it the first few times they see it, but then the penny drops and they identify it for what it is. Hidden text and links will not be noticed by your human site visitors, but the spiders can read it. You get temporary good rating, but then it is over.
Mirror pages and doorway pages
People hope to rank for mirror web pages that have identical content, but using different URLs. Mirror pages is not an accident, these pages are deliberately constructed to boost ratings. It is the same with doorway web pages; people aim for high ranking with poor quality content that offer nothing to the human readers. These pages contain no unique content, but are a repetition of other web pages and have no navigational menu. The sole aim of doorway pages is to appeal to the search engines.
Link farms and URL cloaking
Links farms are web pages with no useful content whatsoever. These pages are only created for people to harvest links and use on their websites. The links are mostly not even vaguely related to your website content. Using link farming is a seriously bad idea and penalisation through the search engines will be the end result of such practices.
URL cloaking results in different web pages for human readers and search engine spiders. The spiders see greatly optimised and content rich pages for ranking purposes while human readers get something totally different.
Unethical SEO practices rob website visitors of value and search engines always find out. It is simply not worth it for temporary good ranking to put the continuation of your online business on the line for this. Starting all over again is can mean financial ruin for the websites involved.
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A startup business a few months back asked for some advice about SEO at a networking event. We chatted about ethical SEO techniques and we exchanged business cards. I amazes me how some people think that they can learn SEO in 5 minutes then pop off and try to do it themselves.
I had a quick look at his website a few weeks later and he’d used two very similar shaded colours. Not quite same colour on same colour but pretty close. Certainly of no benefit to the website visitor.
I gave him a call and told him that the tecniques he had used are considered black hat and unethical and that he was likely to get banned from search engines. His response was that he’d looked at some other websites and they’d done it, so he’d copied them.
This just goes to show that the internet is still suffering from yesteryears bad practice and those do-it-yourself website creators copy whatever is out there, whether it is good or bad.
He did end up taking my advice and took the dodgy black hat text off within a few hours.
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Using black hat SEO techniques can prove to be good initially but in the longer run this damages your website reputation a lot!