Google and other search engines are in the business of delivering the most relevant content when you search. Google is very, very smart about analyzing the meaning and quality of content because they want to provide consumers with the best results possible.
But some SEO agencies engage in what are called “black hat” tactics. There are hundreds of ways to tweak content to move it to the top of a search engine results page (SERP), and some of them break Google’s rules. Get caught by Google using black hat tactics and your content will be banned from its results pages sometimes permanently.
The new frontier for black hats is social media. Social media traffic now accounts for more than one-third of all Web content. Many social media posts are opinions or recommendations, so Google values social media posts — and that makes social media valuable to the black hats.
Black hat agencies are now setting up thousands of phony profiles on big social networks like Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn and using those profiles to tweet and post links to client content.
Ever gotten a Facebook or LinkedIn invite from a young woman in India or Croatia you’ve never met? There’s a good chance that’s a black hat agency at work.
Google recently caught Expedia and its search agency using an automated spamming tactic on Facebook and Twitter. Expedia pages were dropped indefinitely from Google’s first three SERPs. When the penalty was announced, Expedia lost 25% of its stock price in one day. After a month, Google relented on the ban, but Expedia’s pages still languish behind competitors.
Google periodically re-writes their search algorithm to fight the black hats, as they did late last year with their “Hummingbird” release. It included a whole new strategy for social media traffic. Black hats may win for a day or two, but in the Wild West of social media, Google’s Hummingbird is the new sheriff in town.
Here’s more about social media black hats.