When you’re optimising your website for the search engine spiders, are you using white hat or black hat techniques. What..? Do you know the difference? You should, because if you don’t, google may penalise your site.
Not so long ago there were software programs that created doorway pages, generated content pages based on links or even created entire websites with little or no effort. This is not content that google likes.
Think about it. If you searched on google for ‘how a hamstring muscle works’ would you want to be re-directed to a page that wasn’t relevant, was full of links to other sites or just tried to sell you ‘deep heat cream’? You wouldn’t.
Google is only protecting it’s good name as a search engine that delivers results as close to what you are searching for as possible. So, if you want your website to survive long-term, don’t practice black hat SEO. Don’t,
- Stuff long lists of keywords, either invisible (white text on white background), or visible, very small and right at the bottom of your pages
- Generate ‘doorway’ pages to attract the search engines and redirect users to another page that doesn’t rank so well.
- Use software tools that automate the generation of pages, links or content, based on some-one else’s content
Google and the other search engines want unique content that is relevant to the searched-for words or keywords. If you want to rank well in the search index, and stay there, use white hat SEO techniques, such as,
- Add your keywords to the page title, heading and the first paragraph
- Find ‘authority’ sites that will link to your site using relevant text and keywords
- Write, or pay a freelancer to write, relevant content for your site
See my earlier post on get better google rankings for more ideas. If you black hat SEO, google will find you, eventually, and penalise your site. Your website could be banned – forever.
Do you white hat or black hat SEO?
What’s your opinion on this topic?
