What Happens to BlackHatters

Tempeted to take some shortcuts on your ride up SERPs mountain? Be aware that consequences come with some actions, and you might be better off taking the straight and narrow path.

1. Keyword stuffing. This might make you seem relevant to the search engines, but will bite you later as your visitors will not find such things valuable.

2. White on white text. This allows you to stuff keywords invisibly, but Google will penalize you if they catch you. And they will catch you.

3. Buying links. Google will also find you out – they even encourage others to report you and again a stiff penalty could hit you. Don’t buy links, don’t pay for reviews, just don’t.

4. Spamming. You could spam through email, or on forums and blogs commenting, or by overloading social sites with links to your site. It might momentarially raisy your PageRank, but then you will find yourself banned from places which have the potential to help you long term if used correctly.

5. Cloaking. Don’t redirect the webcrawlers and bots to one page, and consumers to another. Trying to trick Google or any other major search engine is not a sound plan – they will find out and you could be penalized.

Worst case scenarios for black hatters include being dropped from indexes altogether, never being able to get re-indexed, spending hours and hours trying to track down your own wrongdoing and undo it, losing the trust of your customers as well as other webmatsers, getting banned from participating in large portions of the web, etc.

Best case scenarios include a very brief moment of success that fleets by and is gone before the crash begins and you lose everything including your reputation.

Don’t be a black hat. It’s not worth it.