Can You Take the Risk of Black Hat Marketing?

If your company markets on the web, chances are you've heard of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO refers to implementing tactics that will help your website improve its visibility to the search engines.

There are two basic types of SEO that can be implemented onto your website, and they are white hat and black hat SEO.

White hat marketing uses natural and organic methods such as keywords to increase visibility. White hat marketing takes more time to generate results, but their results last much longer on the search engines.

Black hat marketing tends to be more deceptive in how they generate their visibility. These tactics are considered unethical and can result in the de-indexing of your website from the search engines.

Black hat marketing tactics.

There are many ways that black hat marketing can be implemented into a website. One of the most popular black hat methods is the use of keyword stuffing. In order to generate visibility, your site needs to include keywords.

For white hat marketing, your site needs to include natural keywords that flow well with your content. For black hat marketing, websites place keywords into their alt tags, meta tags and comments. Some even go as far as entering keywords on to the site in the same color as the background color so that it can't be seen by visitors but the search engine crawlers can find it.

Another black hat marketing tactic is using doorway pages. These are web pages that become listed in search engine results pages (SERPs), but when a user clicks the link, they are redirected to another site entirely.

Black hat marketing also employs the use of backlinking. Backlinking involves posting links to your website on other sources, such as comments on blogs or other popular forums.

What are the risks involved with black hat marketing?

People choose to implement black hat marketing tactics because they generate results more quickly than white hat tactics. While white hat tactics can take weeks to marinate, black hat tactics can actually work overnight.

Implementing black hat marketing comes with risks. If your site is caught, you can be de-indexed from the search engines or your site could be shut down. Some people don't worry about this, because if their site gets de-indexed, they will simply create another one and employ the same tactics.

Now, however, search engines such as Google are actually keeping track of the sites that are de-indexed, and if your name was listed as the creator, Google will not index any site that contains your name.

Aside from being de-indexed completely, your site could lose its ranking and drop down to the last page on a SERP. If this happens, your black hat marketing tactics will have backfired.

Should I risk it?

Implementing white hat or black hat marketing tactics is completely up to you. Many sites understand the risks involved, but still choose to implement them because they increase visibility in a very short amount of time.

If you can risk your ranking being dropped or risk being de-indexed completely, then black hat marketing may be a marketing tactic you're willing to use.

If you've spent too much time and money creating your website, and if you want to earn your rankings organically, you should lean towards implementing white hat marketing tactics.

Danielle Notts is an SEO writer and freelance blogger who lives in the Dallas area. She realizes the importance of proper grammar when it comes to blogging so she never submits any work without first proofing it with a grammar checker.

Photo Credit: bourndesign