We all know that SEO is a difficult and time consuming process. Once you finally narrow down a couple of key words to optimize, it’s tricky to utilize them in ways that are helpful to your blog post. That is why some people engage in practices such as keyword stuffing, link bait, sneaky redirects etc. Being slightly deceptive is a lot less time consuming. But if you are on the brink of using black hat SEO to optimize your content, think again. Hopefully these horror stories scare you out of the practice.
Brad’s Black Hat Blunder
Brad Gerlach was new to SEO and wanted to try out some tactics on his webpage. He did not realize the difference between black hat and white hat SEO practices. All he knew is that he wanted to increase his webpage traffic – quickly. He studied blog posts from some not so clean SEO “specialists” and began to use their tactics. It worked pretty well until Google released their Penguin algorithm update which caught all the sites that he used to build paid links. Essentially, he became invisible to Google. Protocol80 shares a more in depth version of his story on their site.
The iFly Bug
The iFly website had been seeing significant search traffic and then over the course of a couple of days, it completely disappeared. What happened? When conducting admin on the website, someone let a bug slip through. This bug injected small codes onto every single page of the website. What’s the harm in a tiny line of code? A lot. This particular line of code essentially told Google not to crawl the page and include it in its index. So, if anyone searched for iFly’s optimized keywords, their content would not even show up on the SERP. This study goes to show that marketers must be careful when setting up webpages and make sure they are not unintentionally introducing any bugs.
The Toys R Us Crash
Our last story contains a well known and beloved brand. They didn’t intentionally use any black hat tactics, but they made a pretty big mistake. Toys R Us purchased the domain toys.com, but did not set up any of the links on their old site to redirect to the new one. This set them far behind in terms of SEO because Toys.com was indexed separately from the Toys R Us brand. Medium.com gives us a little more insight into the issue in this article.
Hopefully, these three SEO horror stories can aid you in becoming a better and more careful marketer. With Google constantly changing its algorithm, it is important for companies to be transparent in their website practices and stay up to date on the best white hat SEO tips.
5 Responses
Interesting stories! The Toys R Us story is something I imagine happens to a lot of users. Lots of websites not in their prime anymore have broken links, and links that do not direct the user to where they want to go or to the new site. I liked the highlight of these issues and this was an enjoyable section to read.
Poor Brad!! This post is a great example of how easy it is to accidentally engage in Black Hat SEO if you do not learn what it is and how it’s used. It’s a good encouragement to stay up to date in the good and bad of SEO for your business.
This is a great idea for a post, but I have a few questions. First of all, who is Brad, and why is he important? is he some random person or a part of a well known company? Secondly, if Toys R Us didn’t use black hat SEO, why is it on this list? The iFly story was very entertaining though!
Interesting stories about black hat SEO. Hope this discourages others from using this even more. I would like to know more about internet bugs and how to get rid of them.
Hi there, poor brad. This ifly bug messing with the coding is terrible. Increasing the security of what you are doing when online has never been more important due to the ways that people can hack your content.