Black Hat Tactics Are Guaranteed to Backfire

Like most dishonest business practices, black hat marketing tactics may yield returns in the short term, but they’re guaranteed to blow up in your face.

Your customers are people, even if your customers are businesses. (Businesses are made up of people, after all.) And people always have their guard up when they’re being marketed to by companies they have not learned to trust yet.

Some black hat marketing techniques—bait and switch, for example—have been around for ages, but we have brand-new categories now with the rise of the Internet.

Social media manipulation. If you install a program on your web site that forces your readers to automatically “like” your company page, they’ll find out when they peruse their list of “likes,” and they will feel had. They will feel had by you.

Their fake “like” will turn into genuine dislike. Many will tell their friends, and Facebook may eventually close your account, dropping your number of genuine likes and fake likes alike down to zero.

Cloaking. Google explicitly says, “don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, a practice commonly referred to as ‘cloaking.’”

If you run a cheat eats diner, but deliberately attract web site visitors with an invisible five-star restaurant page set up solely for search engines, you’re cloaking.

Used car salesmen have a bad rep. Some of them surely don’t deserve it, but think about the stereotype. He’s dishonest. He’s pushy. And he charges too much.

Imagine how much more annoying he’d be if, according to his storefront, he sold Mercedes and Jaguars but in reality he only sold Chevys and Fords.

You don’t even want to be in the same time zone as that guy. Your would-be customers won’t appreciate it, and it wouldn’t matter much if they did. Your site will get blacklisted from search engines.

One of the most famous cases involved BMW in Germany. They wanted hits from readers who searched for “used cars.” (Some people actually want to find a used car salesman.) So they created a cloaked “doorway page” that redirected readers to the regular BMW web site.

Google found out and reduced BMW’s search rank to zero.

Hidden Text. You won’t annoy your web site visitors if you can create hidden text crammed with keywords that will only be seen by search engine spiders, but at the end of the day this is just a less annoying version of cloaking.

Search engines may not be sentient, but they are designed by people on the lookout for this sort of behavior, and you’ll pay for it when they catch you.

Cybersquatting. If you register a domain name that’s similar to the name of a well-known company and hoping to pick up their customers, you’ll only hurt yourself as soon as customers get wise. And they will get wise.

Domain name shenanigans aren’t the only form of cybersquatting. A self-published writer decided to put the name “Stephen King” on his books in order to fool the real Stephen King’s fans. The reader reviews on Amazon.com are scathing. Amazon will catch on soon enough and blacklist this author, and his career—such as it is—will implode.

Don the black hat if you want, and it might even work for a while, but your market share will crash after your customers and the gatekeepers at search engines figure out what you’re up to. You’ll be the used car salesman, and unlike some perfectly ethical people who happen to sell used cars for a living, you will have earned that reputation.

What’s the ethical way to sell things?

Marketing-schools.org says that question has never had a satisfactory answer, but we all know the answer.

It’s simple: be honest.