Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 183

BLACK HATS AND WHITE HATS
If you want to build a successful search marketing campaign, you need to stay within the borders of each search engine’s
terms of service. Search marketing tactics that violate those terms of service are called black-hat; those that play within
the rules are called white-hat.
Black-hat search marketing tactics are not only unethical (and sometimes illegal), but also bad for business. Violating the
terms of a search engine may create short-term results, but those results won’t be sustainable. Search engines like Google
continuously update the algorithms they use to rank websites in an effort to squash black-hat methods such as link buying
and keyword stuffing.
Marketers who use white-hat search marketing strategies — those who follow the search engine’s terms of service and
build a better user experience for searchers — are rewarded with higher rankings and more traffic, leads, and sales from
search engines.