What White Hat Does Not Include

What White Hat Techniques Do Not Include

Despite the countless rules in search engine optimization (SEO), none of them are considered laws. There’s no governing to create regulations that everyone must follow.

There are guidelines released and updated by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. They are pretty complicated, when you get down to specifics, but are actually pretty straightforward when it comes to what your website should do.

Your website should contain honest straightforward content describing your business, publication and/or industry and the content should be original, interesting and legal.

When it comes to ethics and SEO techniques, they are divided into different colors, such as white, black, and gray. Black and gray are the ones you should avoid at all costs, as they use techniques that are meant to trick search engines into thinking your website is more popular and more significant than it really is.

The problem is, these techniques can be detectable, or reportable, and that can mean serious bad news for sites that use it.

What Are Examples of Black or Grey Hat techniques?

There are dozens of unethical practises used by some SEO services. We have listed the most common here to give you an idea of why they are not good practice.

Keyword Stuffing:  Keywords are normally added into texts, so if their target market searches for their niche using the keyword they have chosen, their pages appear in the search results.

Some webmasters though, prefer to cheat using keywords. They stuffed their pages with a lot of them. Worse, some of them are “invisible”: the human eye cannot read them but search engine crawlers do.

Cloaking: Cloaking occurs when the website seen by search engines is quite different from the page viewed by Internet users. A lot of the text content is cloaked so the people viewing a page do not see it, but the search engines do. This is a deceptive practise and can result in major penalties.

Link Farms: Everybody SEO marketer or specialist knows that link building is very important since it encourages a higher page rank. When a page receives a good score from search engines, especially Google, the website appears in a much higher position in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Nevertheless, if the line is crossed and your website gets submitted to link farms (sites that only exist to provide links to unrelated websites and provide them in large numbers) or to irrelevant sites, or to obvious pay-perlink sites, you run the risk of getting a penalty (see below).

Duplicate Content
As the title suggests, any content which is copied from another website, or exists elsewhere in your website, may indicate to the search engine software that your webist eis attempting to boost search traffic in an unethical manner.

So, How CAN These Practices It Hurt You?

There are really only 3 ways you can lose with bad SEO techniques, and they are all very bad:

Website Domain name removed from a search index: This is one of the most painful actions a search engine can take. This plainly means your entire website, including its pages, is removed from the index. Even worse – they do not notify you of your penalty, nor do they tell you specifically why you were penalized.

What this means:

No traffic to your website will come from the search engine that does this. To undo the damage, you would need to undo all the things that were done to trigger this penalty, and then request to be re-included. But there are no guarantees you will ever get back into their index once you have been removed.

Demotion of a website in search results: One of the most common ways search engines penalize your website for unethical practices is to move your website down several pages in the search results. Again, you are not informed when this is done, nor are you told specifically why, you just notice a sudden drop in daily visitor traffic.

What this means:

Far less traffic to your website will come from the search engine that does this. Even a demotion of one page of results can lower traffic by 75% or even more.  Since the average demotion is 3 pages, you can see how serious it is. Again, to undo the damage, you would need to undo all the things that were done to trigger this penalty, and then request to be re-included. But there are no guarantees you will ever get back into their index once you have been removed.

Loss of Indexed Pages from the search index: Sometimes only part of your website is penalized, but the consequence can still be bad. A large percentage of the pages in your website (including possibly the home page) can be suddenly removed from the search index. This can be for the same or similar reasons for other penalties. And as in all cases, you are not notified.

What this means:

Considerably traffic to your website will come from the search engine that does this. This can vary widely depending upon which pages. This is actually the best of the three penalties to suffer, since there is a better chance to get re-included by removing the offending pages.