Why Whitehat SEO Beats Blackhat SEO

Have you ever searched Google for something simple and pure, like “free ringtones” or “free wordpress themes” only to find that the top-ranking searches are sites filled with misleading design and content that ultimately leads you to a site asking for your money? It is insanely frustrating to search for one thing and getting results just about the opposite of what you wanted. There is a reason why this happens, and the bulk of it is due to blackhat search engine optimization (SEO).

What Is Blackhat SEO

In order to know how to avoid blackhat SEO, we must first understand what it is and how it works. Blackhat SEO attempts to improve a site’s search ranking through techniques prohibited by search engines or in violation of their Terms of Service. These techniques generally exploit some hole in a search engine’s algorithm until the algorithm is updated to catch and nullify the exploitation.

Spamming for Links

One of the most well-known blackhat SEO tactics that has recently fallen out of fashion due to a recent Google update is submitting low quality content to link directories. In exchange for a low quality article (some of which duplicate content already on the web), a link directory will give you a link back to your site and help you rank on Google.

Article Spinning or Scraping

The practice of spinning is similar to spamming duplicate articles for links, except that you use software to rearrange words in hopes that Google will not detect it as duplicate content. Scraping comes in a variety of cunning forms, but usually involves taking bits content from multiple different sites and mixing it all together on one site. The most devious scraping sites will also scrape comments and tweet reactions to make their content appear most authentic.

Keyword Spamming

This technique involves cramming keywords into your content to target a specific set of terms in search results. While keyword spamming leads to horrible, unreadable content, they can sometimes rank high for certain searches because their spammed keywords align well with specific searches.

Doorway Pages

This technique is usually performed after utilizing a couple of the techniques above. Once you manage to get a page to dominate a search result, you make that page a “doorway” page in which it redirects traffic to a sales page, sometimes for things completely unrelated to the original search result.

Cloaking

Cloaking essentially dupes search engines by showing them one version of your site while your users see something completely different. The idea is that if a page isn’t ranking on its own merits, you would stuff a bunch of keywords into the version you send to search engines. This way you will rank higher on search engines, but your content won’t be worse and scare off your current audience.

Why These Techniques Don’t Work

By far, the best reason to avoid blackhat SEO methods is that they are short-lived. If you know you are going against the Terms of Service of Google, then you have to realize that whatever work you are putting into this exploitation could easily vanish as soon as Google catches on and changes their algorithm accordingly. Then all of your work is for nothing.

On top of that, blackhat techniques often directly lead to bad, unreadable content. So even if you happen to game Google and get to the top of a keyword rank, most people who click on your site will automatically associate it with bad quality and pass it immediately. Many people won’t even click on the site if they can tell from the search results page that something is fishy. So despite your search rank, you might not even get your desired affiliate commission or even traffic.

Lastly, blackhat techniques make users of the internet less confident in search engines and the web in general. This hurts all internet marketers, blackhat or whitehat. The less people value search results, the less value your job has.

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