Black Hat SEO refers to using questionable or clearly unethical internet techniques to build traffic and high search engine rank. Integrity on the net is overlooked when internet marketers use Machiavellian techniques to deceive and manipulate other people for their personal gain. Below is a list of some of the techniques are questionable, Machiavellian, or “Black Hat SEO.”
These techniques lack ethics and integrity and some of them may get you suspended or banned from sites on the internet.
Let’s all join together to use high standards of ethics and contribute healthy, wholesome, good quality material to the internet. Your actions can make a difference, one person at a time. Let’s be the “white hat marketing” folks.
For those who are unfamiliar with Machiavelli here’s a brief summary. The term refers to the Italian Renaissance diplomat and author Niccolo Machevelli. His principles are described as cunning, deceitful, self-serving at the expense of others. The internet term “black hat marketing” refers to internet marketing that uses unethical techniques to achieve success.
Here are some examples of questionable techniques or outright Black Hat Marketing and Machiavelliansim.
1- Black hats use keyword text that is the same color as the background on websites to increase SEO. Visitors can’t see it but search engines read it.
2- Keyword stuffing means writing content that is artificially loaded with keywords for the search engines. These days search engines are punishing this writing by lowering the SEO of these pages.
3- Craigslist ghosting refers to using unethical software to get around the craigslist rules that limit ads. People who lack integrity seek out all the ways they can find to cheat the craigslist rules. We’ve all seen places where they fool craigslist by typing out a link to a page that would be banned by using the whole word “dot” instead of using the period in the hyperlink.
4- Article spinner software is used to automate a rewrite of an article to produce extra content on the web. The articles can look like garbled tangles of keywords without quality information. Internet marketers who lack ethics contribute low quality time wasters to the net this way, hoping to get their website links out where prospects can see them.
5- Software to remove dates from blog posts to trick visitors so they don’t know it’s old, outdated material that may not be correct or accurate anymore. This way the blogger keeps the material on the net, attracting visitors.
People waste their time using information in the outdated blog post only to find it doesn’t work anymore.
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