Claim: It never pays to use Black Hat (grossly unfair) or Gray hat (slightly or very shady) techniques
Status: False
There are a lot of "not nice" SEO techniques (See Black Hat SEO) like stuffing a page with keywords, or redirecting
pages, using shadow domains, or making or using "link farms," or making a script that increases
Click Popularity of a link in
search engine results. The claim is that these techniques never work because search engines find you out immediately and ban or
penalize your Web site. If you take that literally, then you were probably one of those kids who got scared because the
mattress tag in the good old days said "Do not remove this tag under penalty of law" (what if the tag falls off? OMIGOD!)
and you might believe lightning strikes sinners. It might.
Oh how we wish that crime didn't pay! But verily the wicked flourish. It is not hard to find in
almost any Google search, especially for less common keywords and phrases any and all of the following in top ranked
pages:
Pages that are listed as having a keyword, but the displayed page doesn't show that word at all, either because the
page was changed but the Google listing was not updated, or because of intentional fooling of the user or search engine
- description tag doesn't match contents, page was redirected automatically etc.
Pages that have the keyword, but their actual content is not related.
Links that land you in an entirely different Web site.
Pages that are generated on the fly apparently and that will have any key phrase you entered in Google, without any
information about it.
Domain names that are composed of the keyword, but in reality are just "parking" or exploitation domains with a lot
of unrelated links - these are link farms essentially, sites created to exploit users and search engines. They are
supposedly banned, but they flourish nonetheless.
At one time there was at least one totally unrelated Web site displayed by Google in a top ten position for a key
word, among 8 million pages listed for that word. Apparently the domain name had been bought by an SEO exploitation
company. It remained in that top position for years until I complained about it. Soon after, it disappeared, though I
can't swear my complaint had anything to do with that. There must be numerous examples of such words.
Some people do make money from Black hat and Gray hat SEO. Moreover, the search engines probably catch and penalize
only the more innocent practitioners who don't know how to avoid the filters and evade the wrath of competitors. Search
engines don't and can't devote huge resources to finding all of the worst offenders. Sadly, crime does pay, but it is
still, at the very least, "not nice." There are also folks who make money by selling fake Viagra and promoting gambling
sites and virtual or actual whore houses and Nigerian confidence game scams. Often they are the same folks doing the
black hat SEO techniques. If that's what you want to do, us moral majority folks can't stop you.
