Ethical Internet Marketing vs. “Blackhat” Marketing

It goes without saying that an hour’s work earns an hour’s pay and that the job should be done right the first time .   Any ethical and reasonable person would agree.   But it’s another thing altogether to promise the world yet deliver misleading counterfeit results in what seems to be the blink of an eye.  Unfortunately there’s still too much “fool’s gold” being handed out in this industry by shady SEO specialists simply looking to make a quick buck.

Don’t be fooled by the “quick and dirty” services that promise you big-time results within a day or two. Doing things right means focusing on your specific market space and geographic area (when appropriate) for the purposes of driving targeted traffic…not random traffic…but targeted traffic to your website.

I too am quite aware of underhanded ways to quickly drive hoards of random untargeted traffic and backlinks to any website very quickly for the purposes of artificiallyinflating page ranking and search engine presence. But is that really the point? Is that truly helping your business in the long run?

Let me give you a real-life example of what I’m talking about. Several months ago, a local chiropractor client of mine responded to a message left by a slick salesmen from an underhanded company and employed its services. Sure enough, this company delivered exactly what they promised…..more appearances at the top of the Google search page and many more visitors. The only problem is, their marketing tactics caused his local chiropractor site to show up in searches all over the country which did him no good whatsoever in terms of bringing in local customers.  Plus it created quite a nuisance for honest local chiropractors in many other cities. One chiropractor in San Jose, CA  actually called my client from across the country to complain about this, questioning his ethics and intent in the process. Needless to say my client cut ties with this underhanded SEO company to the tune of several hundred wasted dollars.

Employing ethical internet marketing practices, also known as “whitehat marketing” is the only way to ensure longevity and true success in the online world. Furthermore, it’s simply the right thing to do.

Compare internet marketing to say raising livestock or even being a great pro baseball player.

whitehat marketing = raising healthy, organic livestock in the wild.
blackhat marketing = feeding steriods and corn to churn out livestock
in just a few weeks.

whitehat marketing = Derek Jeter
blackhat marketing = Barry Bonds

Get it? Bottom line: Blackhat marketing is cheating!

Google defines blackhat marketing as “Trying to deceive our web crawler by means of hidden text, deceptive cloaking, or doorway pages compromises the quality of our results and degrades the search experience for everyone.”

Search engines have become highly tuned to fishing out blackhat marketing tactics and will not only penanize a site in search results, some sites are actually banned from appearing at all.

SEO Design Dynamics has a zero tolerance policy for blackhat SEO. You will never ever ever be able to associate any of the terms below with our practices:

Purposefully Driving Unrelated/Untargeted Traffic
Spam
Adult Content
Illegal Content
Excessive Keyword Repetition
Excessively “alt” tag Repetition
Excessive Popup Windows
Meta Spam
Cloaking
Gateway or doorway pages
Scraper sites
Link spam
Link farms
Hidden links or Text
Sybil attack
Spam in blogs
Page hijacking
Refferer log spamming
Buying expired domains
Mirror websites
URL redirections
Doorway page
302 Jacking
Spam in blogs

All these terms are associated with automated, quick-fix methods aimed at providing mass amounts of traffic and backlinks to your website quickly. No consideration is given to the relevancy of subject matter.

For example, I once made the mistake of using automated article submission and backlinking software programs aimed at producing mass volumes of backlinks to my site. Viola!! Hundreds of backlinks to my fitness site suddenly appeared over the next week. The only problem was, they were from porn sites, foriegn trade sites, art blogs, political blogs…anything but fitness related sites which was the theme of the site I was promoting. Needless to say, this was sniffed out by Google within a few weeks, and my blog site fell off the search listings for quite some time.

I watched a reputable healthcare company try this very same tactic. They had held the number one spot for the most common searches in their industry…then decided to get greedy. A new product came out creating some intense competition across many vendors.  This particular company decided to try blackhat tactics to gain an edge. Not to my surprise, they disappeared completely from Google’s list for that particular search term for at least a week (I stopped checking after that).

How many times have you clicked on a link expecting one thing only to be redirected to another site OR have pop ups appear on your screen which were totally unrelated to your search. Irritating huh? Well the search engines agree and they have become intelligent enough to sniff this type behavior out.

There are ethical ways to develop a solid strategy the right way…the Derek Jeter way. It may take a little more time, but, just like Derek, you’ll have a long tenure at the top and will have quite a few long term fans.

As a general rule, sites touting quick results and large quantities of anything (article submissions, search engine submissions, backlinks, etc.) in an automated or “auto-pilot” fashion, should be considered suspect.  There are only two automated services I would ever consider using which I discuss in my backlinks and article marketing post.

If you’ve not done so already I encourage you to check out my introduction to internet marketing for small businesses post especially if you’re somewhat of a newbie or looking for a structured way to manage your SEO and marketing.