Imagine that you entrusted the development of company’s website to an experienced marketer who promises you grandiose outcomes in the Internet space. In five days you find your firm on the first page of search results. But a week later, for example, Google or another search engine excludes your website. You are puzzled with by the question: “What happened?” The fact is that the specialist hired by you used prohibited methods.
It's about Black Hat marketing, i.e., a set of unethical strategies for online business promotion. Through deception and manipulation, such tactics often help to achieve a tremendous effect in the shortest possible time, but the latter could seriously spoil your reputation. In addition to negative feedback from other companies, you may also face large government fines.
Who Employs Black Hat Marketing?
If corporations with a high level of consumer confidence do their best to avoid the marketing practices of a black hat, then small-sized companies or newly-established firms tend not to neglect them. Besides, some business players could take part in such approaches, even without realizing it. Usually, pornographic sites use these strategies for attracting additional traffic because reputation is not the main thing for them.
However, there is one nuance. When search queries provide data unsatisfactory to the consumer, first of all, the reliability of the system itself suffers. Therefore, such giants as Google and Yahoo are constantly upgrading their own search algorithms to avoid selecting sites with a black hat. Identification of online violator entails its removal. Thus, companies applying this approach may only rely on short-term profits and a further lack of prospects.
Objectives of Black Hat Marketing
Black Hat techniques mode refers to the methods of search engine optimization. Its goal is to achieve a high ranking of references in the Internet space in order to facilitate users searching for a particular company or products. If White Hat technologies are aimed at creating web pages that contain necessary information and are being evaluated for their work, Black hat strategies are focused on misleading most of the search engines by providing frankly useless data.
For instance, a client is looking for a “five-star hotel” and hopes to open pages dedicated exclusively to the hotel business. The correct black hat SEO could refer to a completely different website, displaying, say, news about a car or a yacht. Many users quickly close an unnecessary page, but their visit positively affects the company's traffic using Black Hat marketing. Ethical SEO focuses on the right topic, and keywords are perceived as indexes or headlines.
What Kind of Strategies Count As Black Hat?
In addition to SEO, black hat social media could include the next practices for increasing a rating:
- Cookies. Legal marketing uses similar files for tracking. When clicking on the link, a user must pay a certain amount for the source. The advantages of this tactic are obvious. The consumer receives high-quality content, and the search engine could count on increasing loyalty. A “black hat” marketer, as a rule, secretly downloads client computers through fraudulent counterparts, even if the link has not been downloaded.
- Duplicated content is associated with the traditional practice of copying text fragments from various sources. Such information blocks are very similar, and sometimes they even quote each other. Typically, search engines prefer unique content, so this approach refers to the worst black hat methods since we are dealing with overt manipulation. That's why it's very important to specify the original version of the article in order to make potential copies invisible to Google bots.
- Manipulation. Many websites sin by installing widgets that make visitors automatically “like” or publish them in their social networking accounts. The popularity of the site may also be achieved by posting links to it in other people's blogs.
- Spam. These are the keywords in the comment tags intended for redirecting backlinks. We are talking about an attempt to match certain site to some search engine, regardless of whether it really contains the right topic or not. Akin links do not convey valuable information and are a real waste of time. Remember that if your blog is absolutely open for comments, and experts do not control their semantic sense, getting spam is just a matter of time. Such a dubious future should be avoided, as it will negatively affect your readers and reduce the quality of work.
- Link Farming. This procedure is aimed at increasing incoming requests by using pages that contain only links to similar ones.
- Spinning refers to kind of plagiarism created with the help of special software. The latter paraphrases an original for further using and presents it as a new message. Corresponding modification significantly reduces reputational risks. Together with the methods described, a way of invisible text is often used. In this case, keywords remain unseen to the visitor, but search engines could index them.
Many companies are wondering: are these marketing techniques suitable for them? The answer depends on your plans. If you are trying to create a business of your dreams and pass it on to your children, it is a better to look for alternative ways to improve your ranking. Of course, White Hat procedures take longer to generate quality results. But they will save you from the danger of being blocked or damaging your reputation.
Thus, Black Hat marketing is not interested in gaining long-term aims. Firms that use it simply want to find themselves on the top faster at the expenses of another company. Users of websites containing a black hat SEO usually do not make a purchase, whereas the concept of a White Hat is more attractive for both searchers and customers.