There
are so many unethical SEO companies that claim to be able
to boost your website to #1 in search engine rankings, however
they use overwhelmingly aggressive marketing techniques and
attempt to manipulate search engine results. This gives the
industry a bad name.
The main problem with SEO companies is that they base their
methods and techniques on research trial and error and speculation.
As a result of the secretive indexing criteria of search engines,
webmasters and SEO companies can only make an educated guess
about the ranking systems and possible algorithm revisions.
SEO companies may be able to achieve high search engine rankings
for your website because they are good at what they do, however
the way they do it can be precarious and dangerous.
Some SEO companies may use 'Black Hat' techniques to manipulate
search engine results to their advantage. These techniques
are high-risk and even illegal, and can get a site banned
from search engines. Black Hat techniques can cause severe
damage to the business of an e-commerce company.
Here are a few examples of 'black hat' techniques:
o Hidden text/hidden links: stuffing your pages with keywords
or links too small to read or the same color as the background,
so viewers are unable to see any difference in the aesthetics
of the page.
o Cloaking: using browser or bot sniffers to serve the search
engine spiders a different page than the page visitors see.
It is used to show an optimized page to the search engines
and a different page to viewers.
o Multiple submissions: submitting your domain and pages to
search engines, for example submitting http://www.logobee.com
and http://www.logobee.com/samples as two separate urls.
o Link farms: sites created solely for the purpose of search
engine ranking. These sites are nothing more than random links
which have no relevance to one another.
o Selling PR: sites that sell their high PR links for a fee
through direct advertisement and for the sole purpose of increasing
link popularity.
o Doorways: having one page stuffed with keywords that re-direct
to another more user friendly page.
o Meta tag abuse: having too many keywords in the meta-tag
description, title and keywords.
I am not implying that all SEO companies use 'black hat' techniques.
There are some that use safe techniques, however I am only
pointing out that relying on an SEO company to achieve top-level
rankings for your website is a gamble.
Overview