It’s important that your SEO campaign is as organic as possible. By organic, this means that it abides by a set of etiquettes when trying to get your site indexed. If your site is repeatedly in violation of these rules, your site could get penalized, which means a drop in search engine placement. Even worse, your site could get banned, which means it could get unindexed altogether. It is recommended that you contact professional Pleasanton SEO services if you’re not aware of what constitutes organic SEO. You can visit this page to get in touch with an Internet marketing company.

Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO

For those that embark on their own SEO campaign, they may frequently hear the term “white hat” and “black hat.” The former is synonymous with organic SEO and includes creating backlinks through blogs, article directories, and social media. It also entails creating well written and informative content for those backlinks.

Black hat SEO is the opposite and entails all the unethical techniques that could get your site penalized. So what constitutes black hat techniques? One example is using an article spinner to generate dozens of spun content from a single article. The result is dozens of poor quality articles that are barely readable. Search engine spiders are advanced enough these days to detect articles that have zero value to the reader.

Consistently submitting backlinks to plagiarized articles can also hurt your site. Even if you rewrite an article from an existing source, use a plagiarism checker to be sure the article doesn’t get flagged as copied content.

Do-Follow and No-Follow Sites

There is also the issue of do-follow and no-follow sites, which most people aren’t familiar with. Whenever you submit a backlink, that link provides what some people call “link juice.” The accumulation of link juice is what bumps your site up in the search engine. However, many people began taking advantage of blogs, forums and article directories for the sole purpose of creating backlinks. To combat the problem, the webmasters turned their site into a no-follow site. This means that any backlink you include will provide zero link juice and will not contribute to your search engine placement. Do-follow, by contrast, is the opposite and will provide the link juice. How much juice you get depends on the site’s Alexa ranking.

There are tools that allow you to enter a URL, and it will let you know whether the site is a do-follow- or no-follow site. You may think then, that you should only add your backlinks to do-follow sites. This is not exactly the case. Search engine algorithms are quite smart, and it will get suspicious if all your links are from do-follow sites. The algorithm may interpret this as a black hat attempt on your end and penalize you. As a rule of thumb, some Pleasanton SEO services recommend submitting at least one backlink to a no-follow site for every four do-follow sites that you add a backlink to.

SEO is tricky work, and sometimes there are grey lines between what constitutes organic and unethical SEO practices. To err on the side of caution and avoid potential penalties, leave the work to Pleasanton SEO services.