“How blackhatters can affect your ranking and SERPS, how to detect it and what to do about it.”
Black hat SEO really is a plague for the rest of us when we’re trying to raise or maintain SERPS using white hat techniques. The search engines work very hard to create algorithms that will be able to detect the sites that are trying to “fool them” into giving great ranks, but they can’t yet be 100% successful.
Google’s policies ban black hatters and will act if sites using those techniques are reported. However, no matter how good they are, it seems that there will always be some black hatters who will remain one step ahead in the game.
This means that for the rest of us, we are often doing everything legitimately and watching our ranks fall because of black hatters.
Because of some of these darker techniques, you should not only watch to make sure that your rank isn’t falling, but you should also ensure that you haven’t had your site dropped altogether. There are many techniques that black hatters will use to simply eliminate the competition – you – completely.
Therefore, you need to regularly monitor whether your site has withstood the battles on Google, or whether they’ve gotten to you.
Make sure to stay calm at all times, even if you suspect that you may have been dropped from Google. This kind of thing is common and it’s entirely fixable. Once you take the right steps, you’ll be right back there in the SERPS before you know it.
Here are your steps:
Check out your status using Google’s Webmaster Tools (available at http://www.google.com/webmasters). This is an important place to start your checking since Google uses this site to tell webmasters about any issues with their own sites. It’s not entirely obvious to use – you’ll need to know what you’re looking for.
When you go to the “Site Status” wizard, what you want to see is two big green checkmarks beside your “Pages from your site are included in Google’s Index” and “Googlebot last successfully accessed your homepage on”.
Remember, even if your site doesn’t have a green mark, it may not necessarily mean that black hatters got you. If the first green checkmark isn’t there, it could mean that your site was never indexed in the first place – not that it was necessarily banned. The second one means that something is giving the Google spider a hard time in trying to index your website. It’s either something you’ve done or something a black hat has done. These are both important to investigate.
You may want to look over Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to make sure that you aren’t doing anything wrong. You may have inadvertently hurt Google’s feelings by doing something even minor on your website, and all it might take is a small tweak to remedy it.
Be extremely careful in case you have duplicate content on your website. Did you use it legitimately? If you have duplicate content, be sure that you’ve got permission from the owner and that it’s well documented on your site. If the duplicate content is your own and you’re using it multiple times on your website, you may need to simply reword some text so that you can show Google you’re not simply spamming.
You are going to need to be a bit patient here. If your ranks have dropped, but you’re still listed, then give it a minimum of four days to see if your scores bump back up again. If after that time, you’re still way down there, find out what the problem is, fix it, and have your site re-indexed.
If someone has used black hat on you, it’s time to contact Google and let them know that you’re a white hatter, and that your site isn’t doing what they think it is. You should be able to resolve that situation together.
Hope you enjoy reading it all.
Itay