Did you know that Black Hat SEO (or search engine optimization) can destroy your site and make its Google search page results ranking drop like a rock? Check out this story…
In Why You Should Avoid Black Hat SEO Link Schemes At All Costs, John Paul Titlow shares the story of how JCPenny.com received at lot of backlinks from thousands of other websites.
A backlink is a link that points back to your website. Usually, you get this when you publish something useful, informative, or entertaining, and other online publishers (or bloggers) or website owners then publish an article that contains a clickable word or phrase that funnels visitors back to your site.
This is both normal and good, but when the backlinking appears irrelevant, then it becomes obvious that people are simply trying to game the search engines and trick them into making the backlinked site more visible in the search engine results pages. In such cases, the backlinking (found in the comments area, for example) is not genuine, and may perhaps even be paid for.
Now here’s the curious thing… according to the article in ReadWriteWeb.com, J.C. Penney denied paying for such links. But they got penalized, just the same.
In the past, you’ve heard of internet marketers say that your site won’t be penalized if others link to you in a questionable way. Afterall, if other people can affect your site’s rankings in the search engines, then all they have to do is create thousands of autobot blogs, point links to your site, and then have the search engines venting their ire on your site.
And it did make sense at that time. You could go on publishing relevant content and not worry about competitors using black hat SEO tactics to make you look like a spammer.
But with this case of J.C. Penny, although they denied paying for such spammy links, the webspam team went ahead and manually penalized JCPenny.com
So if you want to attract more visitors to your site, keep your eyes wide open especially when hiring SEO Consultants or virtual assistants who set-up backlinking campaigns or link schemes for your site.
