Having good rankings in a search engine is vital to the success of any business. However, building rankings illegitimately will provide short term growth and will be detrimental to your business in the long run. Many SEO companies use Black Hat and border line white hat practices to increase rankings, the consequences of which can get your website permanently banned from Google.
Duplicate Content
Reaching the number one spot on Google rankings requires hard work. It requires a marketing campaign that’s original and unique. As with any other type of advertisement, the content has to be genuine. Copying material from other
websites and posting it as your own is plagiarism. Although your company might be against these types of practices, certain SEO companies, in an attempt to maximize profits, will copy material from other websites and post it as their own. Other forms of plagiarism include using copyrighted material but changing certain words or rephrasing content to make it look like your own. Certain programs and websites will rearrange content to make it look original. This is also plagiarism and Google will notice the copyrighted material. Not only is plagiarism illegal but highly frowned upon. If your website is caught plagiarizing it will get banned from Google and might face legal charges for copyright infringement. That’s why we recommend you get involved with your SEO marketing campaign, so you don’t have to face the consequences for an SEO company’s black hat practices.
Using Keywords that don’t relate to your content.
Most of these black hat practices are different forms of false advertising. They deceive the user into visiting the website, not to build long term customers, but just increase rankings in general. One method SEO companies use to lure irrelevant visitors is to use keywords that don’t relate to your business or content. This results in random visits to the website, increasing the ranking but providing no return on investment. You have probably experienced this as well, clicking on a website claiming to offer a specific service or product and then being redirected to a website that does not pertain to what you were looking for. We recommend making sure the keywords being used are relevant to your business.
Link Exchanges and Bad Neighborhoods
Google has a very intricate system of categorizing websites within its search results. Google keeps tabs on all websites 
and the content being published. Along with content, Google also keeps track of the links being posted on your website. If these links lead to spamming sites, also known as “bad neighborhoods”, it will lower your rank in the search results. It’s a good idea to keep an eye on the links being posted on your website. Certain SEO companies will use link exchange programs, paid link placement and other schemes to manipulate the search results. It may increase rankings for a little while but as soon as Google finds out, the website will experience a massive drop in rankings. This incident recently just happened to JC Penny. The SEO firm they hired (and subsequently fired) created an artificial web of links.
Link Building
As with anything else in life, building a prominent internet presence requires time and effort. This is something most SEO companies are simply not willing to contribute to your business. Recently a company hired an SEO consultant to increase their presence on the internet. The SEO company outsourced the link building by paying another website to build blog roll links. The rankings increased rapidly within the first two weeks. The customer was satisfied with the results and never bothered to check the links. Every month the SEO company would report 20 new links posted for the website. The customer thought the SEO company was posting 20 new links every month, but in reality they were using the original 20 links and simply changing the anchor text, making them look new. The customer kept paying month after month never bothering to check the links. The customer’s rankings decreased and the SEO company was let go due to its illicit practices.
Spamming other sites with links to your website
This is something we see happening in almost every website, especially in the comments section. This is not a good way to attract customers to your website. Certain SEO companies, in a desperate way to build rankings, will spam other websites in an attempt to lure visitors. They will spam links to websites that are not relevant to your business, for example posting a link to a website about cell phones in the comment section of YouTube. This is something that is regarded as being rude, the internet community hates spam.