Why You Should Wear Your White Hat with Pride

As a webmaster, it is hard to see spammy websites with thin, but keyword-rich, content in the SERPs top positions, while your site remains in the third position. Despite all your hard work, a cheater, using black hat SEO tactics is getting the majority of the traffic for your keywords. As an SEO professional, it is difficult to explain to clients why you charge what you do when a competitor who offers no valuable content are ahead of them in the SERPs.

Search engine bots can be fooled in the short term, which is all these website owners care about; they are not growing a business as you are. With keywords that do not have any major players as competitors, it is easy to obtain the top spot temporarily. Once Google starts seeing the website's bounce rate, it will not the position for long. Unfortunately, individuals who do this, often do it for affiliate earnings. Once a visitor lands on the site and does not find what they are searching for, they may click on an ad to get what they want.

People who use black hat methods to rank well know that they will only hold their position for a short time, and then they will create another website to replace the penalized one. When you own a ring of sites like this, it is easy to get backlinks without earning them. If you can find evidence of a link wheel by analyzing their backlinks, you can report them to Google. Link wheels are black hat strategies created by someone who owns multiple websites in related categories; site one will link to site two, site two to site three and so on.

Take heart, even if a spammy website is temporarily ahead of you in the SERPs, just keep plugging away and building your business. People will discover your site and appreciate its valuable content.