Report Black Hat SEO

Report Black Hat SEO

There are a lot of methods pertaining to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that some may perceive as falling into the category of black hat.  Such tactics all serve the same end though, how to optimize a web site and drive the most traffic to it as possible.  Driving traffic to a website is usually so that people will click on advertisement, affiliate links, or other types of offers which result in making money for the person hosting the site.  Is black hat really wrong?  The only person that really gets “hurt” by the person using these techniques is the automated page crawling robot and other potential competitors who may be treading along that same ethical line themselves.

To report black hat SEO is pretty standard.  The major search engines have evolved and have sophisticated algorithms for ranking sites these days and some of the illicit methods used by black hats to bump up rankings include keyword stuffing, unrelated keywords, doorway pages, and tiny text or alternate methods of displaying text, and also submitting a site repeatedly to a search engine.  These activities fall under the category of spam but plenty of legitimate sites are just as guilty as so called black hat methods, many of which are detailed on Black Hat World.

Each search engine has different interpretations of what they call this so-called spamming and how to report black hat SEO.  Google refers to any attempt to deceive their web crawler as spam and asks that you utilize their report a spam result page.  Yahoo similarly defines pages that are created to trick the engine into offering inappropriate, redundant, or poor quality results and have outlined these issues in their quality guidelines.  MSN discourage the use of some spamming techniques including keyword stuffing, invisible text, and false links.  Ask defines spam in part as a result unrelated to the query.

Though there is uproar over these SEO techniques and how to report black hat SEO mentioned in this article, not so long ago all of them were completely legal and considered very ethical.  As a matter of fact they made a lot of people very wealthy.  Black Hat World is a good place to start researching these techniques.  Affiliate marketing for example is a completely legitimate method on the internet these days.  There are so many companies, big and small who all use this to pull in consumers for all sorts of services and products.  What it boils down to is that it’s the consumer who has to make the final decision of whether or not to click a link that will take them to an offer or a purchase.  And it is ultimately the consumer’s decision as to whether or not the pitch works and they pull the trigger.

I’ve seen the internet evolve for over a decade now and in this world of automation, scraping, and competitive page ranks sometimes you need all the help you can get.  Sometimes, you have done all you can to optimize a site.  Sometimes it’s worth taking a chance especially when there is a lot of money on the line.