Black Hat SEO - If You're Thinking of Doing Black Hat SEO, Think Again!

Black hat SEO marketing is yet another controversial marketing tactic that can become very effective in the short term. But it’s not recommended as a reliable, long-term search engine strategy due to the risks involved.

As you may already know, most marketers reject anything that goes against the traditional or ethical route. The same holds true for black hat techniques to rank high on the search engines.

But what is black hat SEO marketing anyway? You may probably notice that forums, and even search engines experts like Matt Cutts, do not recommend SEO black hat techniques for many logical and obvious reasons. Among the public reasons why, the term black hat is associated with cheating and short cuts.

Short cuts and cheating your way to top ranking on the top 3 search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN is deceiving, and even against policy rules on most of the search engines.

When it comes to the law in the United States of America, black hat SEO is not illegal (yet) at the time I’m writing this, which is why some marketers consider doing it. But among many of our studies, the reality is that most marketers dislike black hat SEO and the majority just doesn’t approve the practice.

Some black hat SEO techniques include:

• Keyword stuffing – This involves posting a lot of nonsensical keywords into your website for the sake of ranking high for those keywords, without regard to the relevance of the content.

• Doorway Pages – These phony pages are invisible to the web surfer, but lures the search engine spiders into thinking the sites are relevant.

• Invisible text – This involves using font color identical to the background color, aiming to be seen by the search engines but masking the keywords from the human eye.

If you start a business ethically, practice white hat SEO, and do what search engines like you to do – it’s not fair for another site to outrank you by just purchasing a domain name and in 2 weeks be in top of the top 3 search engines as a result of applying black hat SEO. Especially if it took you several months to be on page one!

Despite its bad reputation, you can make lots of money with black hat SEO. But can you make a consistent living from it? If you stay under the radar, it could skyrocket your earnings! However, it is not recommended because it’s a short-term strategy that entails higher risks of getting banned by the search engines.

Since most people are accustomed to doing the right things, the traditional practices shared by most search engine marketers is white hat. But since white hat may take longer to take effect and white hat marketers usually do not make any money as fast as black hatters do, they become frustrated. These frustrations are the ones that bring even more frustration when they see someone else having success by cheating their way into the search engines. Hence, some marketers are lured into the dark side.

Can you make money by applying black hat SEO techniques? Yes.

Is it easy to achieve results with black hat marketing? It could give you a short-term search engine boost, but it could get you banned. So the short-term results you’re getting may not be worth the risks involved.

Is black hat SEO cheating and unethical? Yes it is.

Many people cheat at some given point in time, and most people do like short cuts despite the risks. It’s up to you to decide whether it is for you or not!