Ethical Search Engine Optimization

"White Hat" & "Black Hat" SEO Techniques

Like so may industries, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms include both "good guys" and the "bad guys."

Beware of SEO firms that make unrealistic claims. Google Webmaster Central contains various warnings about deceptive practices of these firms. Employing black hat techniques can not only lower your website's page rank, they can even cause your site to be banned completely.

White Hat SEO

In spite of what many unscrupulous SEO's say, there really are no "secrets" to Search Engine Optimization. Ethical SEO is simply studying and making full use of the methods by which Google and other search engines use to determine page rank. It takes real work and some time, but it WILL enhance page ranking results over time, sometimes very dramatically. It is the process of helping the search engines define and index the full extent what products and services your company offers, and compares its relevance of that index to individual "queries" being searched for.

Black Hat SEO

Unethical "Black Hat" SEO tries to misrepresent web page relevance & cheat — to "fool" the search engines. Employing such techniques can bring disastrous results to your page rank. Search engines are constantly exposing sites which are "spamdexing," and are not ignorant of the "cutting edge technique" that some seedy SEO representative offers to sell you on. Those found guilty are "rewarded" with lower page rank — even removing suspect pages or websites from their indexes entirely.

Banned from Google?

Having a site banned from Google is fairly rare, reserved for particularly bad "black hat" behavior. Offenses usually result in a reduced page rank instead of an outright ban. The quickest to find out if your site has been banned and completely removed from Google's index is to enter the following search into the Google search bar:

 site:www.yoursiteaddress         (replace the red text with your url)

this search will return results of the all of pages that Google has indexed for the domain address. If your webpages do show up in Google's search results, then you have not been banned. Any "missing" pages are not being indexed for one reason or another.

Google will now, at their own discretion, reconsider a banned website. A Google ban is not always permanent. Most of the time you can just "change" whatever it was that caused your site to be banned and submit a reconsideration request.

Graphic Connection is a freelance SEO and website design studio located in Lee's Summit, Missouri. You can contact Graphic Connection for a free, no-obligation consultation about search engine optimization.

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