Blackhat SEO and “Lie to Me”

You may have heard of a new T.V. show called “Lie to Me” that has recently started airing on FOX. I have watched several episodes of the show and I really enjoy it. If you have not had a chance to watch this show here, is a quick overview of what it is about. “Lie to Me” involves several specialists who are experts at detecting if someone is lying or not. These investigators are called in to investigate all types of situations where people are suspected of lying to cover something up. “Lie to Me” stars well known actor, Tim Roth.

The reason I mention this show in my blog post is to compare this show to Blackhat SEO. Like in the show “Lie to Me”, Blackhat SEO is a way that webmasters or search marketers try to deceive or lie to the search engines. But like in “Lie to Me”, search engine algorithms have learned how to detect lying or spamming websites. The algorithms are constantly being updated to look for new patterns or signs that a website is a spam site and then remove the spam site from the search results. They are so good at detecting spam now that many current blackhat techniques are not only going to get sites banned from the search engines but it is moving towards to outright illegal - Matt Cutts, PubCon 2008.

Like in the show “Lie to Me”, the lying website or spam website is going to get caught. So it is better to not try to deceive the search engines with blackhat techniques. Use legitimate optimization and internet marketing techniques that are approved by the search engines and avoid the inevitable consequences that come from trying to manipulate search rankings through blackhat SEO.