Beware of Black Hat Marketing Consultants

Black hat techniques in online marketing are a really bad idea. Marketing consultants who provide promises for huge and fast amounts of traffic might be using grey or black hat techniques. Don't be fooled into doing this. The short term traffic surge could hurt your website permanently and won't be likely to win you much favour with clients. Read on to learn about this method of marketing and how it isn't a good idea --- even if it sounds, at first, like a great way to bring traffic to your site quickly.

What is black hat marketing? If you imagine old western movies, the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black cowboy hats. Online marketing consultants could conceivably be seen as the same way. If you hire a marketing consultant that wears a black hat, his methods could be potentially harmful to you down the road.

Examples of some black hat techniques include:


Keyword stuffing. Overusing keywords in your site in an effort to make search engines index you for that word won't do much long-term. Search engines will ignore pages that appear to have zero value and your customers won't be likely to buy from a site that doesn't use quality in the web content either.

Invisible text. Another keyword stuffing technique that black hat marketing consultants use is to write text in the colour of the site background. People can't see the words but search engines can. This is a tactic that could get your site penalised when search engines discover you've done this.

Fake / Doorway pages. Don't try to fool websites into thinking that your pages are valuable and /or seen by your customers when the pages are just fake.

Link farming is another bad idea as is comment spam.



Whilst certain techniques could help you get put on the first page of Google and other search engines for your desired search terms, this might not happen for long. Google regularly uses checks and balances to prevent black hatters from succeeding for long. Certain tactics could have you de-listed from Google altogether and something like that could harm weeks, months, or even years of internet marketing efforts.
When looking for someone to help you with your marketing, marketing consultants who promises surges of traffic overnight might be using black hat tactics. Be sure that the consultant you deal with isn't.

Seeking help from skilled marketing consultants is a good idea. Chris Jenkinson is a skilled and respected business marketing consultant, providing consultancy services for many years. He provides further advice about marketing and business consulting services on the GizTheBiz blog.