Black Hat SEO You Might Be Using That Can Lower Your Ranking
Sometimes people vanish out of the Google index and don't know why. Usually, they come to an search engine optimization (SEO) company like ours when they want to find out. Over the past few years, we have discovered several common inadvertent (or advertant "worked at the time) "black hat" techniques that tripped people up in the search engines. What is "black hat SEO? For the uninitiated, "black hat" refers to practices that are designed to get rankings in the search engines by using unapproved or unethical methods. The usual goal of this type of optimization is to get high rankings for popular search terms, then monetize the traffic that comes in, regardless of the site's relevance. In the early days of search engines, it was common for webmasters to trick people by placing irrelevant sites into search engine results. Many of the sites presented had adult themes which were not requested by the user. Part of Google's early credibility came fr...