Have you ever hired an internet marketing agency? It’s common these days to hire an outside agency to handle your SEO Los Angeles, especially as search engine algorithms are always changing their parameters. It takes time to keep up with those changes, and you may have more important things to do. Hiring a company whose job it is to keep up with the ever-changing world of SEO makes a lot of sense. The one thing you want to watch out for, though, it that the company you hired is only using approved and ethical techniques to drive traffic in your direction. Here are a couple black hat techniques that are sure to get you penalized by search engines. Make sure your agency isn’t engaging in either of them.

Cloaking

This is a technique that has become more popular recently among black hat SEO specialists. Cloaking is where different content or a different URL is presented to a search engine spider to fool it. It’s a bit of trickery where search engines are being manipulated so that sites get the desired ranks from the presence of target keywords. The problem comes about when the people who are using those deceptive URLs are directed to places that have no relevance to what they were searching. It’s in direct violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, so make sure that your company isn’t doing it.

Invisible Text

This is an inventive technique that someone implemented for shady SEO. They use a white background that has keywords on it in white text. A visitor cannot see the words, but a search engine can, and it indexes them accordingly. This causes a website to be boosted artificially in the rankings, and it serves the same purpose as keyword stuffing. Like keyword stuffing, web crawlers are now aware of this technique, and they’re on the lookout for it.   

The thing to remember about black hat SEO is that no matter how many new ideas come out for duping search engines, there are always going to be changes to the algorithms that will nullify and expose them. Google and other search engines are serious about wanting to deliver users a quality result, and they’re going to sniff out sites with fraudulent and malicious intentions. The result is always going to be the same: penalties, or getting your site banned. Be smart, and don’t try this stuff, nor should you let your marketing agency think they can get away with it.