Google+ business optimization (Google Local Optimization) can be a legitimate way to increase your website’s visibility and draw in more traffic. It can also be a deceptive scheme to manipulate search engines and visitors for financial gain. It would probably get a good idea to figure out the lay of the land, ethically speaking, before you invest too much time and energy in optimizing your own site. This article will help.
Black Hat Google Local Optimization Techniques
Different Google Local Optimization techniques are broadly divided into “white hat” and “black hat.” The analogy comes from Western movies, where good guys and bad guys wore appropriately-colored headgear. The dividing line between the two is rather fuzzy, but what you really need to know is that black hat Google Local Optimization is frowned upon by the search engines. If they feel you’re employing such tactics, they won’t hesitate to punish you by lowering your site’s ranking or, in extreme cases, by de-indexing it entirely.
Deception is the real key to assessing the ethics of the Google Local Optimization work you do. If everything you do to a page to boost its ranking is relevant to its subject matter and you respect the privacy of the visitors who come to it, you have nothing to fear. It’s when you start cutting corners and being dishonest that your Google Local Optimization hat gets darker. Stuffing in keywords in great volumes, using keywords that aren’t related to your content, scraping personal information off of visitors – these are all tactics which will get you in hot water.
If it’s so frowned upon, you may wonder why anyone bothers with black hat Google Local Optimization. The ugly truth is that cutting corners with Google Local Optimization gets fast results, just like many other fields. If a webmaster is willing to be deceptive and invasive, it’s not too hard to push a page up into the very highest ranks of the search engine results pages.
Turn the question around, then. If black hat Google Local Optimization is so effective, why not use it and get an edge over the competition? Once again, the difference between ethical and unethical behavior plays out in the usual way. The rapid results produced by black hat work are transitory. They don’t last long before search engines crack down on them. A career in a black hat will bring many successes. It has to, because none of them have any staying power.
That is ultimately the reason why you should stick to the straight and narrow. Optimizing in an ethical fashion leaves you with nothing to worry about. Your site’s rankings will be safe and durable. It’s true, you need to invest continuous effort to maintain strong rankings, but if you stick to ethical Google Local Optimization you won’t have to deal with artificial penalties imposed by the search engines.
Hopefully, this article has made the ethical issues involved in Google Local Optimization pretty clear without delving into specifics. You should have a better idea now about the risks you run by playing a dirty game in the optimization arena. If you do your optimizing work with a commitment to honesty and fairness, you’ll slowly but surely rack up positive results.