What happens if a company only uses black hat techniques for an extended period of time?
-
Let's say I were to start a company. Of course, I want to be indexed, crawled, and pulled up in the search engines. So I start using black hat seo techniques. I comment spam, keyword stuff, spin articles, hide text, etc. I publish hundreds of articles per day on well know sites with excellent page rank. If I am doing all of these unethical techniques, what is going to happen to my website?
-
There is also the possibility that the initial boost you get from your techniques will result in high visibility for your site which means you will get legitimate links from other domains that will build your rep so that if Google ever bothers to drop the value of your black hat links to nothing you still have plenty of authority from real links.
There is also the possibility, even though Google would of course deny it, that if you are also spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on Adwords that they will overlook any bad stuff you do and you will never suffer.
Just speaking from experience - watching another company.
-
Well in the short term your website would increase in rank and increase your traffic. As time goes on though - Google would eventually see the pattern as it does with mimes and decrease, not only your pagerank, but also your domain authority as a result of the link spamming from low quality sites. The longer the page remains with low quality links and poor SEO practices, the more and more likely it is that it will be penalized or even black listed.
Does not recommend.
-
Well I will go one by one
comment spam - probably nothing since if google took action then you can comment spam a competitor and take them down - so this reasoning would be counter productive
keyword stuff - you will get penalized if google catches you
spin articles - nothing especially if you do a good job
hide text - you will get penalized if google catches you
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO companies that own linking properties
Hi everyone, I do some SEO work for a personal injury attorney, and due to his profession, he gets cold-called by every digital marketing company under the sun. He recently got called by a company that offers packages that include posting in multiple directories (all on domains they own), creating subdomains for search listings, and PR services like writing and distributing press releases for distribution to multiple media outlets. The content they write will obviously not be local. All this and more for less than $500 a month! I'm curious if any of you have any experience with companies like this and whether you consider them black hat. I realize I'm asking you to speculate on a very broad description of what they offer, but their linking strategies sound risky to me. What experiences have you had with companies like this? Do you know anyone who has ever gotten a penalty using these tactics? Thanks, in advance, for sharing your thoughts.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ptdodge0 -
Are businesses still hiring SEO that use strategies that could lead to a Google penalty?
Is anyone worried that businesses know so little about SEO that they are continuing to hire SEO consultants that use strategies that could land the website with a Google penalty? I ask because we did some research with businesses and found the results worrying: blog farms, over optimised anchor text. We will be releasing the data later this week, but wondered if it something for the SEO community to worry about and what can be done about it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | williamgoodseoagency.com0 -
One guy using some Alexa rank tricks to gain high PR etc..?
Hi! One finnish guy is getting pretty nice Alexa ranking to his sites, even if the real traffic is not somewhere near it would lead for that cool Alexa rank. I am a bit suspisious if he is using some Low Bounce Rate High Traffic Boosters on his sites.. I will give you some examples here to look into.. Vihjepaikka(dot)com - Created on 2013-03-13 - Alexa Rank 129k!!! - PR3 - Backlinks not many qualitys.. Casinolla(dot)net - Created on 2014-10-15 - Alexa Rank 351k!!! - PR0 - Backlinks 0!!! Cashadvance777(dot)com - Created on 2014-09-04 - Alexa Rank 772k!!! - PR3 - Backlinks 0!!! Let me know your thoughts on these.. Cheers!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kononen0 -
Seeking Top Notch Marketing Company with experience in growing sites post manual penalty
Does anyone know of a company who has direct experience with growing websites AFTER a manual link penalty has been lifted? Any referrals would be great!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Cross linking websites of the same company, is it a good idea
As a user I think it is beneficial because those websites are segmented to answer to each customer needs, so I wonder if I should continue to do it or avoid it as much as possible if it damages rankings...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mcany0 -
Can you use the image description for IMG ALT?
ello ello! We're running an ecommerce site with thousands of products. None of the product pages have an IMG ALT. We're been thinking about an IMG ALT rule to apply to all product page images. Every image currently has a detailed caption so the thought was, why don't we use the description as the IMG ALT? It's perfect as it explains the image. Now the thing is, the length of the description, some of them come to 150 - 200 characters with spaces. Do you think this is too much? Also, would having a caption and the IMG ALT be the same cause issues? Have you guys employed any rules for IMG ALT in a bulk way?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Understanding competitors link building tactics (possibly black hat stuff that seems to work)
So checking out the backlinks on a competitor’s page for a term I’m looking to work on, a page they rank pretty well for, I can’t but happen to note the kinds of sites that grant this company – who are well known in their field – its successes. Many of the links to this page I’m interested in appear within short articles on blogs, really bad Wordpress blogs that are certainly just for SEO use. My questions are: Where do people usually source these blogs which typically contain material on a range of different topics? Are these probably paid links? How do they get so much content out there, albeit similar content, to so many of the hastily cobbled efforts? Would that be an agency with connections or a blogging community site? How can any search engine lend credibility to my competitor’s links when the article below has nonsense for penis enlargement stuff. Seriously?!? How are they not being penalised? It’s frustrating because these aren’t the tactics I want to employ but they seems to offer success, but also, if your link is in an article that followed by another on penis pills, how I can take Google seriously in its stated aim of making things this prone to manipulation.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Are there *truly* any white-hat link-building tactics?
With our new knowledge -- yielded from J.C. Penney, Forbes, Overstock, content farms, et al -- that the link graph/link profile can be algorithmically mined by search engines to uncover non-natural patterns of links occuring over time, is there any level of link-building that is safe to engage in? If so, then what are those "bright white"-hat tactics that are 100% safe for a site to use?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jcolman0