Why do people use Blackhat SEO techniques?
Posted by: James Lewitzke in General Search Engine TalkI can only think of two reasons at the moment:
One possible idea may be that the webmasters who implement these techniques are just too lazy to create something good and are impatient to increase their site ranking. It usually takes months, and probably years, for most websites to flourish and grow naturally.
The blackhatters believe that with their latest link scheme or search engine manipulation, they are already a step ahead of the competition, and their site can grow more quickly, thus also earning money faster in the process. But does spamdexing run deeper than that? Could the entire purpose of creating splogs, keyword stuffing, etc. be because they think they are better than the search engines in some fashion? (Which leads to my second hypothesis.)
Or reason #2, they’re just dumb.
I believe that if you create content worthy of natural links and traffic, the need for Blackhat SEO goes right out the door.
Three words, dude.
Get…rich…quick.
Which basically is the same thing as reason #2.
The problem is that a lot of the blackhats promote, and probably legitimately think, that they’re whitehats. They don’t see what they’re doing as shortcuts, but as legitimate SEO because everyone else does it. It’s funny how everyone grows up hearing the “if Johnny jumped off the bridge…” speech over and over, probably have told it to their own kids, and yet still keep following Johnny off the bridge.
This is a good post, but to me, I think there are other or slightly different reasons:
1) Getting stuck in a circle - once you’ve started blackhat schemes, you usually see results of some sort and if your site gets kicked in the results, there’s little reason (as far as they see it) to go whitehat, so they keep using blackhat methods anyway.
2) Blackhat methods often work for a while. Once search engines realise there are weaknesses, they usually do something about them and certain methods stop working, but until then, the world’s their oyster. They can spam as much as they like and they get results. It’s not good for the long term, but in the short term, it has to be said that it usually works.
3) Bad advice - lots of newbies get bad advice from places like Digital Pointless and just think this is normal SEO. It can be difficult to persuade people from that way of thinking once they are there.
4) The people can be dodgy themselves. They don’t really care about sticking around because they are “wheeler-dealers” (they appear as quickly as they disappear). They don’t care about the mess they leave behind them - all they want is instant results and once they’ve had them, they’re out of here.
Nice expansion on my post Dan :).
I think what you said in those points reflects the fact that most aren’t in it for the long run, and they’re mostly interested in either money making schemes or instant results.
When Blackhat methods stop working (ie. the search engines pick up on them), people wonder what they did wrong, and for the most part, they’re screwed. In the long run I’m not sure how much time most BH methods *last for*, but when they do go belly up, most of those people just look for new BH manipulations to use, instead of learning from their mistakes.
I’ll admit too that when I was starting out with web marketing, I didn’t really know where to begin. I didn’t even know what the difference was between “Whitehat” and “Blackhat” SEO methods. So I thought maybe that submitting to a few directories or participating in a link exchange or two would boost my SE ratings (It was a *long* time ago ;), and it turns out they didn’t help at all). I believe that you just have to come to the realization that you want to make something valuable for your intended audience, and market yourself effectively w/o screwing others in the process.
Unfortunately, BH SEO techniques *are* normal for many people.
(Sorry about that Adam, for some reason Akismet listed your comment as spam, don’t know why?, probably for the “get rich quick” phrase, guess that plugin sure isn’t perfect)
I have no idea why they’d legitimately *think* they’re whitehats, or maybe they just don’t know the difference between “Whitehat” and “Blackhat” and think all SEO tactics are OK.
As I stated in my response to Dan, I think for the most part, it all boils down to the money.
Yeah, that went up okay…I guess the phrase did trigger something. Weird, but not the first time I’ve heard of or seen Akismet trap a false positive.
No harm, James!
Could it be a combination of being dumb and truly believing that what you read on DP actually works? Especially after buying the $99 ebook?
Hmmmmmm……. very possible Forrest, very possible.
Hey James, I just noticed something:
http://www.fallsviewcasinoresort.com/
That looks like a smooshed version of your page background.
It actually does look similar, Adam. It was one (of 4) default backgrounds I could choose for this theme, and it looked the nicest out of all of them.
I probably *could* add a custom one if I wanted to, but didn’t feel the need to get my hands dirty in the php code immediately.