No matter what area of business we care to look at, there will always be those who want to take short cuts. In a lot of cases, those short cuts involve tactics that either go completely against the rules or worse, they are illegal.

This is true of SEO trends, where many business owners who wish to boost their rankings have to decide whether to come out on the side of the angel on one shoulder or the devil on the other.

If, unfortunately, it is the devil then what they are considering is known as black hat SEO. These are the actions that have been ruled by the search engines, and Google, in particular, as against the rules.

If they discover a website has been breaking these rules the sanctions range from a lowering of its ranking, through to the website being completely delisted.

When a website has been delisted, it effectively does not exist as far as Google is concerned, and the chances of them ever-changing that stances are low. If they do renege, it will only be after a lot of hard work from the website owner to clean up their website with regards to the black hat tactics which have been used.

One of the problems is that many website owners are not aware of what is black hat and what is white hat. This is complicated further by so-called grey hat SEO, which are tactics that sail close to the edge and might be regarded as ‘sharp’ but not necessarily outlawed.

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