White Hats Ride High: Why Online Marketing The Right Way is So Important

“When it comes to online marketing, I know we’re supposed to do this the right way or whatever, but can’t we bend the rules a little? After all, our competitors have to be doing it!” 

This is a common frustration among some business owners and digital marketers. 

There’s a feeling that your competition must be “getting away with something.” That they have to be “bending the rules” (if not breaking them) and that’s why they’re doing better in SEO. 

The temptation then is to bend or break the rules yourself so as to overtake your competition. 

It can be tempting to trade in your “white hat” tactics for “black hat” ones. 

However, it just isn’t worth it. 

Google is doing more than ever to make sure that white hat tactics (and only white hat tactics) succeed. At our rehab, plastic surgeon, and attorney SEO company, we only utilize white hat tactics. 

Google’s Getting Better at Spotting and Stopping Shady Practices 

There are many black hat tactics unscrupulous companies use. We aren’t going to get into them here. Many involve link schemes, link spamming, and the like. 

Google is good at finding and eliminating those. Now, they’re getting even better at it. That’s what their recent blog post “A Reminder on Qualifying Links and Our Link Spam Update” showed. 

Toward the end of that blog, they lay it out quite clearly. 

“In our continued efforts to improve the quality of the search results, we’re (Google) launching a new link spam-fighting change today – which we call the ‘link spam update.’ This algorithm update, which will rollout across the next two weeks, is even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages. Sites taking part in link spam will see changes in (Google) Search as those links are re-assessed by our algorithms.” 

Basically: if you engage in link spam, Google will find you, stop you, and drop your ranking. 

It’s just not worth it. 

Building quality links the right way doesn’t happen overnight. But, it can help your company to achieve lasting success. 

A Website’s Rehabilitation Process Can Be Lengthy Indeed 

Many business owners turn to black hat tactics because they don’t see results “fast enough.” They’re tired of what they see as sluggish growth, so they go for the “fast fix” of the black hat. 

Unfortunately for them, that almost invariably makes things worse. 

For example, check out this article. It’s called “How Long for Google to Re-rank a Rehabilitated Website.” 

On second thought, you don’t actually have to read the entire article. 

You can just skim how long it takes for Google to re-rank such a site. 

“Could be months…” “Maybe half a year…” “but when we’re talking about the overall quality of the website, that does take a bit of time…” 

If you thought it took a long time for white hat tactics to work, look at how long it can take to come back from black hat ones. 

For more about how our white hat tactics and attorney SEO can help you, you can reach us at (888) 477-9540.