What happens if a company only uses black hat techniques for an extended period of time?
-
Let's say I were to start a company. Of course, I want to be indexed, crawled, and pulled up in the search engines. So I start using black hat seo techniques. I comment spam, keyword stuff, spin articles, hide text, etc. I publish hundreds of articles per day on well know sites with excellent page rank. If I am doing all of these unethical techniques, what is going to happen to my website?
-
There is also the possibility that the initial boost you get from your techniques will result in high visibility for your site which means you will get legitimate links from other domains that will build your rep so that if Google ever bothers to drop the value of your black hat links to nothing you still have plenty of authority from real links.
There is also the possibility, even though Google would of course deny it, that if you are also spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on Adwords that they will overlook any bad stuff you do and you will never suffer.
Just speaking from experience - watching another company.
-
Well in the short term your website would increase in rank and increase your traffic. As time goes on though - Google would eventually see the pattern as it does with mimes and decrease, not only your pagerank, but also your domain authority as a result of the link spamming from low quality sites. The longer the page remains with low quality links and poor SEO practices, the more and more likely it is that it will be penalized or even black listed.
Does not recommend.
-
Well I will go one by one
comment spam - probably nothing since if google took action then you can comment spam a competitor and take them down - so this reasoning would be counter productive
keyword stuff - you will get penalized if google catches you
spin articles - nothing especially if you do a good job
hide text - you will get penalized if google catches you
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Changing Links to Spans with Robots.txt Blocked Redirects using Linkify/jQuery
Hi, I was recently penalized most likely because Google started following javascript links to bad neighborhoods that were not no-followed. The first thing I did was remove the Linkify plugin from my site so that all those links would disappear, but now I think I have a solution that works with Linkify without creating crawlable links. I did the following: I blocked access to the Linkify scripts using robots.txt so that Google won't execute the scripts that create the links. This has worked for me in the past with banner ads linking to other sites of mine. At least it appears to work because those sites did not get links from pages running those banners in search console. I created a /redirect/ directory that redirects all offsite URLs. I put a robots.txt block on this directory. I configured the Linkify plugin to parse URLs into span elements instead of a elements and add no follow attributes. They still have an href attribute, but the URLs in the href now point to the redirect directory and the span onclick event redirects the user. I have implemented this solution on another site of mine and I am hoping this will make it impossible for Google to categorize my pages as liking to any neighborhoods good or bad. Most of the content is UGC, so this should discourage link spam while giving users clickable URLs and still letting people post complaints about people that have profiles on adult websites. Here is a page where the solution has been implemented https://cyberbullyingreport.com/bully/predators-watch-owner-scott-breitenstein-of-dayton-ohio-5463.aspx, the Linkify plugin can be found at https://soapbox.github.io/linkifyjs/, and the custom jQuery is as follows: jQuery(document).ready(function ($) { 2 $('p').linkify({ tagName: 'span', attributes: { rel: 'nofollow' }, formatHref: function (href) { href = 'https://cyberbullyingreport.com/redirect/?url=' + href; return href; }, events:{ click: function (e) { var href = $(this).attr('href'); window.location.href = href; } } }); 3 });
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | STDCarriers0 -
Pharma Hack/Grey hat SEO. Cannot get site to rank, tons of incoming bad links
I have been working on a website trying to get it to show up in the SERPs again. It is being indexed which is great, it has some errors that I'm fixing now. But for the most part it should be ranking. It don't show any penalties going on, but when I did a backlink search we keep getting the cialis, viagra etc inbound links. First thought was Pharma Hack. But it's not a WP site and I recently rebuilt it. So whatever bad code could have been there it's not anymore. It doesn't show up in google either for the search site:www.mysite.com viagra cialis etc... So I'm wondering if anyone has any insight in a direction to point me? I don't understand what would be causing this to still not rank. Only thing it ranks for is it's name. Any suggestions would be very appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WeBuyCars.com0 -
Recovering from Black Hat/Negative SEO with a twist
Hey everyone, This is a first for me, I'm wondering if anyone has experienced a similar situation and if so, what the best course of action was for you. Scenario In the process of designing a new site for a client, we discovered that his previous site, although having decent page rank and traffic had been hacked. The site was built on Wordpress so it's likely there was a vulnerability somewhere that allowed someone to create loads of dynamic pages; www.domain.com/?id=102, ?id=103, ?id=104 and so on. These dynamic pages ended up being malware with a trojan horse our servers recognized and subsequently blocked access to. We have since helped them remedy the vulnerability and remove the malware that was creating these crappy dynamic pages. Another automated program appears to have been recently blasting spam links (mostly comment spam and directory links) to these dynamically created pages at an incredibly rapid rate, and is still actively doing so. Right now we're looking at a small business website with a touch over 500k low-quality spammy links pointing to malware pages from the previously compromised site. Important: As of right now, there's been no manual penalty on the site, nor has a "This Site May Have Been Compromised" marker in the organic search results for the site. We were able to discover this before things got too bad for them. Next Steps? The concern is that when the Penguin refresh occurs, Google is going to notice all these garbage links pointing to those malware pages and then potentially slap a penalty on the site. The main questions I have are: Should we report this proactively to the web spam team using the guidelines here? (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1) Should we request a malware review as recommended within the same guidelines, keeping in mind the site hasn't been given a 'hacked' snippet in the search results? (https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/4598410?hl=en&ref_topic=4596795) Is submitting a massive disavow links file right now, including the 490k-something domains, the only way we can escape the wrath of Google when these links are discovered? Is it too hopeful to imagine their algorithm will detect the negative-SEO nature of these links and not give them any credit? Would love some input or examples from anyone who can help, thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Etna0 -
Can I use content from an existing site that is not up anymore?
I want to take down a current website and create a new site or two (with new url, ip, server). Can I use the content from the deleted site on the new sites since I own it? How will Google see that?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Is it okay to use eLocal services?
Is it okay to use a service like eLocal's 'reach the web' to clean up our company listings on website directories or is it considered black hat? Our company name and address is inconsistent on many of the website directories and we want to clean it up fast. eLocal has a service that can do this. I just want to make sure it's not considered bad to have a vendor do it. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KristyFord0 -
Virus on wordpress second time PLEASE HELP
hello Mattew i have a big problem on the web is the second time that a virus attacked the wordpress of my web. That is why i am being very busy trying to solve it fisrt time i upload a backup before the attack, but now if infected again All de webs that are positioned on google for ejemple if you look for anithing on google "estetica of propdental.com" it redirects to page http://medicaresue.com can you help me please is the second time and i am losing lots of traffic and positions on google thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Any e-commerce users recommend an SEO company for link building?
I manage an e-commerce site. I wanted to know if anyone has worked with an SEO company for link-building that they would recommend. I DO NOT want articled directories, bookmarks, etc.. I want real link-building from credible/related sites. If you would give me an idea of the results or the general process they use I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Understanding competitors link building tactics (possibly black hat stuff that seems to work)
So checking out the backlinks on a competitor’s page for a term I’m looking to work on, a page they rank pretty well for, I can’t but happen to note the kinds of sites that grant this company – who are well known in their field – its successes. Many of the links to this page I’m interested in appear within short articles on blogs, really bad Wordpress blogs that are certainly just for SEO use. My questions are: Where do people usually source these blogs which typically contain material on a range of different topics? Are these probably paid links? How do they get so much content out there, albeit similar content, to so many of the hastily cobbled efforts? Would that be an agency with connections or a blogging community site? How can any search engine lend credibility to my competitor’s links when the article below has nonsense for penis enlargement stuff. Seriously?!? How are they not being penalised? It’s frustrating because these aren’t the tactics I want to employ but they seems to offer success, but also, if your link is in an article that followed by another on penis pills, how I can take Google seriously in its stated aim of making things this prone to manipulation.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0