By getting high ranking, you can immensely boost your revenue and in some cases, poor ranking can cause a complete business failure. SEO (search engine optimization) is a collection of actions with the goal to get your website ranked higher on the search result. After 15 years of development, SEO has become a complex art and it plays an important part for the success of many businesses. However, some businesses inadvertently employ black-hat methods which cause their ranking to be pushed down by the search engines.
You should find out how your SEO firm works, as they may venture too close to the thin barrier between white- and black-hat methods. If search engines detect an illegal activity your site’s ranking may suffer as the result. This is not a rare case and it happens repeatedly to “innocent” companies. If a company doesn’t know a lot about SEO, it would be difficult to monitor what the firm is doing.
PageRank is the foundation of Google’s ranking method and it is determined by the number of links that come from other Web pages. Both the quality and the quantity of links determine the ranking of a website. The PageRank method is no longer so simple; the site ranking is now determined by more than 200 factors. Google’s secret recipe is obviously not made public; however it is believed that incoming links still play a dominant part.
These are a few ways SEO firms can turn your business upside down:
Linkfarms
Linkfarms are a collection of links on Web page, which is intended to provide the juice needed for a website to achieve higher search engine ranking. Early linkfarms are easy to spot; they were Web pages full with links or spammy blog comments.
The most natural way to get incoming links is to provide compelling contents which attract other Website owners to link to your sites. Another common method is to pay other Websites to post a link; this directly violates Google’s guidelines. Find out whether your SEO firm employs paid links method, in any form, including text links and banners.
Content schemes
The type and number of keywords on the main page of your site determine in what keywords your website is ranked. An early method was by adding a large amount of keyword-rich text on the main page and the text color was made similar to the background so it wouldn’t damage the site aesthetically. Google can easily spot this method and will quickly punish your web site as the result.
Your SEO firm may use a more advanced method called cloaking, where the website has two faces, the search engine bot sees a keyword-rich variant and the users see something else. Eventually, Google will find out and your website ranking may drop to the tenth page of the search result or even removed completely from the search result.
It is quite rare for a website to use the same black-hat method, because there is a good chance that Google will find out. Your SEO firm may initially perform well by driving in plenty of traffic to your site during its six-month contract, but after one or two years, you may unexpectedly suffer a disastrous consequence.
About: Raja is interested in SEO, SEM, Web Hosting and Gadgets. He writes on Reseller Hosting Reviews and Web Hosting Reviews
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