The Dangers of Unethical SEO

Unethical SEO

There are terms and conditions laid out by major search engines such as Google™, Yahoo!™ and MSN™ that prohibit the use of techniques such as link bombing, textual spamming, cloaking and other unethical search engine optimization methods.

Ethical Search Engine Optimization should always conform to these terms and conditions; if not, any results gained for your site and the money you pay could prove not only ineffective but very counter productive when the search engines discover how you cheated your way to the top.

The Impact of Ethical SEO to Your Website

The true goal of a search engine is to return documents that are the most relevant for a particular search query. Ethical SEO will make your page as relevant as possible for a targeted keyword or set of keywords. Black Hat SEO will, instead of enhancing the relevancy for a query, use misdirection and “fake” tactics to gain traffic. Ethical SEO however, will bring you targeted traffic, traffic from people looking for what you are “selling” or offering. Misguided and misdirected web traffic is worthless.

Unethical SEO is Bad Internet Marketing

When a user arrives at your site from a Search Engine they expect to find information that is relevant for their search query. If the content your site returns is not what they were searching for they will not stay and you will not profit. By giving visitors the information they are looking for you will increase the conversion rate of visitors into customers. Google takes into account the Bounce rate of your visitors and you can be penalised for misdirection. By using Unethical SEO it is likely that you could well be losing out on sales to your competition.

Black Hat SEO

These methods include but are not limited to: adding hidden texts, creating doorway pages (or, as Google defined them “pages created just for search engines”), key word stuffing (i.e., bombarding your content with too much keywords and phrases), using popular but irrelevant keywords and participating in link farms.