Black hat web design refers to the use of unethical tactics to try to trick search engine algorithms in order to generate artificial rankings for websites. Given that black hat web design is not based on industry best practices, the smoke and mirrors game it tries to play with search engines – as well as Internet users – inevitably fails (always), leaving a client to pay the price.
In fact, when individuals and businesses make the misguided choice of relying on Internet marketing companies that use black hat web design (and other black hat SEO tactics), they can end up:
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Understanding and avoiding black hat web design and SEO tactics is essential to not sabotaging the success of your website. Here’s what you should know about black hat tactics.
Quickly losing any artificial rankings their website obtained through the use of these tactics
- Incurring serious penalties from search engines (and these can be costly to come back from)
- Having to shell out more money to fix their website and restore it to good standing with search engines and Internet users (as the use of black hat web design and SEO tactics can end up impacting the credibility of a business with potential new clients).
In this blog series, we will take a closer look at what exactly black hat web design is and how you can avoid it. If you need help fixing, updating, developing and/or maintaining your website, don’t hesitate to contact the trusted professionals at Epic Web Results. We are experienced at developing innovative, effective, and affordable Internet marketing solutions for our clients to help them grow their businesses’ online.
What Is Black Hat Web Design?
While black hat tactics (including those for both SEO and web design) are evolving as fast as search engine algorithms are (to try to continue to elude them), in general, the following are some of the most common black hat web design tactics used today:
- Cloaking – Cloaking (or “to cloak a site”) is the practice of presenting certain content to search engines (for the purposes of getting these pages indexed and ranked) while showing Internet users another set of pages (usually sales-oriented pages with little content).Although the practice of cloaking was not necessarily frowned upon when it first used as a design practice, the overuse of it has led to search engines banning cloaking and generally imposing serious penalties on websites that use it (for purposes other than “paid inclusion”).
- Interlinked sites with duplicate content – While interlinking websites is not necessarily problematic (and can be successful when done properly), this practice becomes dangerous when a company rolls out a number of websites with similar or the same content and interlinks them excessively.The reason that this practice has been deemed to be a black hat tactic is that it duplicates content and provides no real value to Internet users. In the event that search engines pick up on a series of sites employing this black hat web design tactic, serious penalties can be imposed on any or all of the involved websites, ruining any gains in rankings these sites artificially obtained.
We will continue our discussion of black hat web design in the upcoming second part of this blog series – be sure to check it out!
Effective Internet Marketing Solutions at Epic Web Results
When you are ready to work with a trusted web design and Internet company that will deliver great results based on industry best practices, it’s time to contact Epic Web Results. At Epic Web Results, our skilled industry professionals are up to date with the latest advances in Internet marketing and SEO best practices, and we are highly adept at designing and maintaining optimized websites that will soar to the top of search engines.
To find out more about how we can help you, contact the professionals at Epic Web Results by calling (800) 501-9724 or by emailing us using the contact form on this page.
