What color is your SEO hat?
If you’re like most of us, you’ll receive emails from SEO companies promising to get you a top 10 search engine placement for your website. Consider for a moment, if these people could truly and honestly deliver on that promise, they wouldn’t have to advertise. Word would get out and website owners would come running with open wallets. But the fact is that they are advertising for their business and people are not racing towards them to rank in the Top 10.
Top SEO companies (if they were any good) should rank very highly for terms like “Search Engine Optimization”, “Internet SEO” and “SEO”. The next time you receive an email guaranteeing placement in the Top 10; Do a search for “Search Engine Optimization” or Internet SEO to see how high that company ranks for those terms. Chances are high that you won’t find them anywhere in the search results. No one can honestly deliver a Top 10 position for every site using legitimate SEO techniques. Any SEO company that makes such a bold guarantee will usually do a number of things designed to trick search engines into ranking you higher for your keywords.
The problem with fooling search engines, especially Google, is that those techniques will work for a while, but they will stop working at some point. Deliberately misleading search engines to get a search engine ranking is called ‘Black Hat’ and is considered fraudulent and punishable by death (no kidding).
When Google redesigns or updates its search algorithms (its formulas) for ranking websites, it’s called the “Google Dance”, millions of websites get new page rankings. The reason Google (or Yahoo or Bing) spends the time, energy, and expense to redesign their algorithms is specifically to get rid of those websites that have managed to cheat the system and rank well using shady or deceptive tactics.
If you are in a hurry to rank high in search engines, try one of those Black Hat SEO companies. If they are effective, you will get a good ranking quickly. But as soon as you “Dance” on Google, you’ll see your page rank drop like the 1929 stock market.
But that’s not even the bad thing about using Black Hat tactics. The worst part is that Google will remove any site from its index that it believes intentionally used cheats to gain position or page rank. That means they won’t list your site anymore until you jump through some Google hoops and show you’re going to play by the rules.
People with high-ranking, long-lasting, and successful sites achieved that status by implementing legitimate or “white hat” SEO techniques. These people would not dare to touch a Black Hat technique. They have real businesses to run, with real employees and families to support, and they’re not willing to risk having traffic to their website shut down for the sake of a faster journey to the top. You should feel the same way. I hope you’re wearing a white hat, if not good luck.