Top 10 Search Results Guarantees Are a Lie!

Too melodramatic?

This may not be a popular post, but it comes up so often that there is always a good reason to revisit why we should never trust anyone trying to guarantee search result placement. SEO is complicated, but Colorado Web Design’s Ft. Collins can help you with your own search engine optimization!

First the scenario:

• Marketer contacts website/business owner with wild tales of thousands of hits per day and first page Google results!
• Website/business owner salivates at the prospects (and who wouldn’t?)
• Marketer explains that with technology, you can get a jump on your competition and bring nearly instant traffic, all for an (arguably) low fee.

Now I’m the first to be seduced by technology. It’s incredible what we can do on or with the Internet. But this is important:

NEVER trust a person who advises you to replace a good business marketing strategy with technological tricks.

If you’ve already read my 4 Golden SEO Rules for Website Newbs you will know a bit about “black hat” versus “white hat” techniques. “White hat” are the techniques recommended by search engines themselves, and generally help to build a good experience for humans and search engines alike. “Black hat” is normally strictly for the sake of search engines, and it dishonestly uses exploits or shady practices to generate higher search result rankings.

No matter how great the plan sounds, and no matter how well it could work short-term, search engine companies are always finding the latest exploits and penalizing or even banning websites from search engine results for trying on a bit of the black hat.

It’s just not worth it.

Here’s the end of our scenario:

• Marketer is hired to try his shady tactics
• Website/business owner sees traffic increase
• Google detects shenanigans and blocks the website from search results

Even clients that I’ve encountered who saw real volume increases via link farms or comment spam noted that the quality of the traffic dropped immediately. It does you no good to double your traffic, but halve your sales-per-visitor average.

And again, there is no easy way to quantify what being banned from Google means if you are just starting up, but most established websites that have gone through this type of experience will advise that search engine bans are financially devastating and to avoid black hat SEO and instant traffic guarantees at all costs.

Sounds like a good plan to me.

Are there any horror stories out there about black hat SEO and the eventual consequences?