In every industry, there are regulations or rules that guide how the business should operate. Then, there are those obnoxious few who ruin it for everyone. The few who insist on pushing the guidelines to the maximum by cutting every corner to make a quick profit. Because we’re in it for the long haul, we’re left to face the new, tighter standards long after they’ve cashed in. Consider those who use Black Hat SEO among those few mentioned above. They’re at the root of why your SEO practices keep changing.
In short, Black Hat SEO is a term used to describe unethical internet search engine optimization ploys that try to get the engines to pay more attention to a particular site based solely on how the site is technically written. In other words, the site is not written with solid content for the user, but rather, it is written to meet the criteria the search engines are looking for. This inflates the owner’s page ranking to achieve recognition not because it has good content, but because it has fooled the search engine. It’s kind of like someone who skips line at the supermarket. You know how upsetting that can be.
It used to be that legitimate use of keywords to build backlinks was the desired standard of internet search engines when ranking pages. Then, the black hats showed up. They began keyword stuffing, which is one of many unethical methods of packing keywords into meta tags and web pages. What did the search engines do? They re-set their algorithms to discard such criteria for rankings and began punishing those who used it, forcing you to re-vamp your site so you could remain competitive.
Rather than try to track all of these covert tricks yourself, it’s recommended that your hire a professional SEO company to watch the trends for you so you can recover quickly when standards change. After all, obnoxious Black Hat types will continue to try to skip line, and you’ll continue to bear the brunt of the resulting changes.
