by samAs anyone in Internet marketing will tell you, SEO is an important part of any campaign. It’s a laborious process but will yield useful results if maintained and conducted in a manner that suits search crawlers. Outside of punishing blatant content scraping of copyrighted material, there is little to enforce the deterring of unethical techniques, except for the inability to maintain the practices over time. Any content that is deemed too much (or too little) of a good thing will be penalised once it is found.
There are many ways that black hat SEOs can push their websites up the search engine result page (keyword stuffing, invisible content, link spamming to name a few) but these techniques are directly defying everything that search engines value in the content. Their algorithms are set in place to ensure that content is in the interest of prospective readers and not just the one posting it. Black hat techniques will most likely yield quick results for the one employing them but it is not a sustainable online marketing strategy. It is always ill-advised for SEOs acting on behalf of clients to employ these techniques. They would be risking their client’s rankings being penalised and it may be difficult to rebuild a reputation after it has been tarnished by spamming.
Unfortunately, black hat techniques are widely used as some business schemes are only looking for short term success – much to the distaste of SEOs using legitimate (‘white hat’) optimisation techniques. Companies wishing to acquire and maintain a favourable ranking and an ongoing online presence will only be able to do so by adhering to search engine requirements. The qualities favoured by search engines are equalisers that ensure that anyone providing relevant content has an equal chance of improving and maintaining the visibility of their website. So, as always, the best option for anyone in internet marketing is to ensure that their content is of consistent value to the user.