Playing by the rules of search engine optimisation (SEO) will save your business time and money. Here’s why.
‘White hat’ search engine optimisation (SEO) means using techniques that search engines, such as Google, endorse.
The danger of engaging in black hat SEO practices, or hiring a firm that uses black hat techniques, is, ultimately, damage to your website ranking. And if you get demoted or blacklisted by Google, you stand to lose a lot of business.
Using black hat techniques is a very short-termist approach. Google is constantly refining and changing its search algorithm in order to weed out black hat SEO techniques.
So while sites that use black hat SEO techniques will generally see their search engine rankings surge up relatively quickly, these can fall just as quickly, once Google rolls out a new algorithm.
Instead of falling down the rankings, the biggest danger is if Google discovers that a site is using black hat techniques. If Google judges that you have seriously violated its Webmaster Guidelines, the company could punish you by either lowering your ranking or, at worst, de-list your site entirely.
For an ecommerce website, there would be nothing worse than no longer showing up in Google rankings at all!
Black hat hunters
An important point is that while Google does not actively hunt down sites engaging in black hat SEO techniques, anyone can report any website.
In other words, your competition could, theoretically, report you to Google for them to investigate. So it often just isn’t worth using black hat techniques – would you want to risk putting your revenues in danger?
Instead, you can achieve the same results through white hat SEO techniques. It can often take longer to achieve organic results, but once the results are achieved, they tend to stay around for longer.
It’s true that it often takes longer for a website to rise up the ranks organically through white hate SEO practices, but once the results are achieved, they tend to last longer. This is because you’ve effectively built your website up, rather than put in place quick fixes.
