Black Hat SEO Techniques - why do they exist?

Tweet by Art Division

You may have heard or read about good vs bad or white hat vs black hat SEO. In a nutshell both relate to the attempt of making a website more prominent in the search engines.

Why is this so important? 

The answer is simple. If your website features high up in the search engines for frequently searched keywords or phrases it's as close to guaranteed traffic as you can hope for online. 

With the stakes so high it's not hard to see why some would cross the line into unethical practice in an attempt to improve results. 

So why doesn't everyone use black hat SEO?

As search engines continue to improve the relevancy of the results they retrieve from their index, they are completely focused on providing quality content to the user.

As a result, if they find a website that isn't playing by an (almost) universally accepted set of guidelines, they will penalise that website. This is what happens to sites that are found using black hat techniques.

So why do black hat SEO techniques still exist?

Depending on several factors (such as how brazen, clever and lucky you are)  it can take months before the search engines realise that a site is using black hat SEO to manipulate it's own search engine ranking. 

But, they will find out and then your search engine rankings will be affected. Drastically. 

Are you using black hat SEO? Perhaps you're employing someone to help with SEO and you're unsure whether they're doing everything legitimately?

Read about the techniques that to avoid black hat SEO.