Why All Black Hat Tools Are Terrible For SEO.

If you are intending to do SEO, never, ever rely on black hat tools to help you, no matter how good they sound.

No matter how much internet marketing evolves, the black hat people are always trying to make tools/techniques to manipulate SEO results and get high rankings via finding loopholes in search engine’s algorithms.

Many times they succeed (at first), but no matter how many times this is tried, in the end these methods always meet the same end: They fail.

What is black hat marketing?

It is basically a non-traditional (and sometimes unethical) approach to SEO where you try to get your website/s ranked in a way that is not welcomed or allowed by search engines. 

For those of you thinking about trying these methods out despite my warnings, I’m going to show you:

1) Why they fail.

2) Prime examples (case studies) of black hat tools you should never use. 

3) Why white hat SEO is the way to go and how to make it happen.

So let’s get going:

1) Why all Black Hat tools fail when it comes to SEO.

Every new black hat method that arrives to the SEO market always aims to do several things:

1) They aim to try and beat the system search engines like Google create. 

2) They try to find loopholes in algorithms in order to get websites ranked higher/faster without going through traditional white hat methods. 

3) They want to make money off people who are looking for these methods to boost their website/s.

Search engines (let’s just use Google) value high quality content on their SERPS. This means they value blogs/sites/articles/videos that contain information that people can view/enjoy/share and keep coming back to.

Black hat approaches on the other hand often do the opposite of what Google wants and try to manipulate rankings using artificial approaches to give Google the impression that your site is doing everything it likes. But we already know this isn’t the case.

Eventually what always happens is Google releases a new update where they change how they rank websites. Usually websites which stick to writing up high quality content that is valuable to the user experience maintain their high rankings or earn even higher positions than before.

And black hat websites? Well they get Google slapped and even blacklisted.

Does this always happen? No, but eventually an update will occur and the site which used to rank high via black hat methods will be exposed and penalized.

Google is becoming much better at spotting these websites which is why no matter how many times the black hat SEO market re-invents itself, Google will ALWAYS catch on, meaning if you build you business upon a shaky foundation (black hat methods), eventually it will crumble.

This ALWAYS happens.

2) Prime examples of black hat tools you should NEVER use:

There are a plethora of programs I could name which use black hat tools in their arsenal, but because that list would be too big, I will break down the methods of black hat strategies these programs and tools use and if you ever run into any programs which do this, stay away from them:

A) Toxic backlinks:

A few years back and even up to early 2013, toxic backlinks (they weren’t called that until the slap came) were the big thing. They were considered to be the key to high rankings and for sometime they were. If you provided a link to your website from a high page ranked website such as an article directory, your site would see increases in the SERPS as well as more authority. 

The black hat industry started sprouting backlink packages during this period and many purchased them in hopes of making SEO easy and while Google didn’t do anything, it worked. People with high and low quality websites saw high rankings and traffic. But then came the dreaded Google update…

Sites caught using these backlink packages were slapped off the face of Google. Millions of sites lost their revenue overnight. Google saw that websites which manipulated their algorithms via backlinks were making low quality websites only aimed to sell things.

And overtime if these types of websites flooded the search engines, Google would experience less trust from it’s visitors. After all why would anyone want to search for things on Google only to be constantly sold something? It was basically like spam. And so they rightfully did what they had do and laid the smack down on them. 

I was one of these people when I used backlink packages from a program called Bring the Fresh. I won’t get into details, but it didn’t end well. I learned my lesson. From then on, I only used these methods to get high quality backlinks.

B) Article and content spinners:

Once upon a time, the black hat industry designed a way to take content, whether yours/someone else’s and indirectly duplicate it to say the same things, but be worded differently. This was through article spinners. This tool allowed people to:

A) Create a massive amount of content with ease, spread it across the web to article directories and receive backlinks and thus high rankings.

B) Create a lot of content for their website to give Google the impression that they had high quality content. 

C) It was the lazy approach to SEO since the need to create your own unique content was overshadowed by simple 1 click methods to generate new content. 

Here’s how Google stopped this: 

Any kind of content which isn’t 100% yours or is attained via article spinning is considered: Poor quality, indirect plagiarism (my opinion), unethical. Thus again another hole in the system was plugged in. 

Some article spinning websites created programs where you could just type in a keyword and a system would take content from the web, reword it and generate it for you in seconds.

Here is an example of these sorts of programs:

• WP Auto Content Machine.

C) Keyword spamming/stuffing. 

Another common method that once worked. If your targeted keyword was typed as many times as possible into your content, it would receive higher rankings. Eventually site owners just spammed the hell out of their blogs with the keywords they wanted to appear under and Google had enough. 

Now if you’re caught keyword spamming & stuffing, you will be punished by Google. As a general guideline, make sure your keyword does not appear more than 1% of the time on your post/pages. 

These are the primary methods utilized by the black hat industry. So the next time an SEO program claims:

• To get you high rankings, assume it means: backlinking & article spinning.
• The next time a program claims fast content generation, assume it’s article spinning. 

Any new program that claims to get fast results is either lying or using a black hat approach mentioned above to try and play the system. Using it will put your website at risk. Fast results don’t always mean long term results and that’s what counts!

3) Why white hat SEO is the way to go and how to make it happen.

Consider white hat SEO to be the complete opposite of black hat. Meaning it’s the good side, the fair side. The one which has stood the test of time and Google updates and has been proven to work again and again. 

Here’s a few guidelines: 

If you’re going to use backlinks, create your OWN content such as YouTube videos. This is natural backlinking and it works. 

Share your content with social networks. Google+, Facebook, Twitter, ect… Sharing is something Google likes. Install the like button on your website. This helps too!

Write quality content! Always write high quality content for your reader, not the search engine. Provide the reader with readable, interesting and engaging content that will have them returning, commenting and sharing your content. 

Always add content to your website. Never stop. Fresh content = newly ranked content = more potential traffic. Try to write and add content regularly. Check this website every few days and you’ll see brand new posts. Do the same with your site.

These tips alone will be a GREAT starting point for your website. In the game of SEO, white hat vs black hat will always have the white hat side winning eventually. It’s been said that the turtle will always win and it is true!

Don’t try to sacrifice your website’s potential by risking quick results. Stick to what works, what has worked and what will continue to work! This will pay off many times over.