With over 100 million Web sites on the Internet, it is more important than ever to achieve high rankings for visibility. While reputable SEO companies use ethical SEO practices, there are others who will try to trick the search engines into high rankings by using questionable techniques.

Many times, an SEO provider will promise quick, first-page rankings and fail to notify the client that they use spam techniques to achieve those rankings. To avoid falling into this trap, you must be aware of unethical SEO techniques and guard against the companies who use them.

Black Hat SEO tactics such as spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular targeted pages in a fashion that is against the search engines' terms of service. Unethical SEO (aka Black Hat SEO) uses various methods to trick search engines in believing that a site is highly relevant to the targeted keywords. Unethical SEO techniques can bring you high rankings; however, visibility is short lived. Once the search engines discover the use of spamming techniques, they will penalize or ban your site from their indexes. If you are removed from a search engine index, it can be difficult and time consuming to be reinstated.

Black Hat Seo (Unethical techniques)

Keyword Stuffing

This practice involves the repetitive use of the same keyword phrase over and over in your Meta tags, Comment tags, ALT tags or in the copy on your pages.

Hidden Text or Links

This practice involves inserting hidden text or links that are readable by search engine spiders but cannot be seen by your site's human visitors.

Cloaking

This involves using a software program to direct search spiders to a group of pages specifically created to trick the spider and re-direct the user to a different set of pages. 

Doorway Pages

Also known as Gateway or Bridge pages, these are low-quality Web pages that exist only to pass visitors to the main Web site without providing value of their own.

Mirror Sites and Duplicate Content

This involves the creation of several sites with identical content and placing them on multiple servers with different domain names. These sites link to one another and are constructed for the purpose of achieving multiple rankings for identical keywords using the same content.

Link Farms

Google's quality guidelines suggest that pages contain no more than 99 links. Link farms typically consist of one page with hundreds of links to sites within different categories that are unrelated to your site content. Such pages contain poor quality content that is useless to visitors.

White Hate (Ethical or Organic Search Engine Optimization)

Ethical SEO" applies to SEO techniques that return pages that are most relevant for a particular search query. Ethical SEO will make your page as relevant as possible for a targeted keyword or set of keywords

Natural or Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that aligns a website's code and content with strategic keyword phrase targeting, ultimately assisting a search engine algorithm in understanding a website's keyword focus and content.

EDG’s search engine optimization strategy does not include overpromising or exaggerated claims. Our team of search engine optimization experts uses proven, proprietary techniques to increase your site's visibility in the search results, while operating under strict industry guidelines. Our SEO experts do not use cloaking, hidden text or spamming strategies. We do have an enthusiastic and intense commitment to increase your site's visibility without unethical tactics.

Beyond the technical disciplines and skill sets required to secure results, EDG’s best practices are what provides the ultimate differentiation from competitors. As a client of EDG you can count on consistent improvement and innovation in our techniques, consistent quality in our delivery, a passionate dedication to improve your rankings and constant communication.