One thing that you can be sure in this day and age is that there are always people who look for shortcuts to get ahead. Search engine optimization is a field full of people who do black hat all the time to get ahead. In fact, I have heard it from a few top notch search engine specialists that while White Hat techniques are the right way to do things, it’s always better to go with the cutting edge BlackHat techniques to make sure that you get the job done faster and in a quicker passion.

Google is usually good at catching people who are trying to spam their indexes. But even today they are not perfect at catching guys who are trying some wacky shortcut to get ahead. For instance, today I did a search on my own name (I have a funky last name that is pretty unique), and I was surprised to seem my name show up in listings that had nothing to do with my name. Here is one listing that was particulary interesting on the second page of results pages:

[my name] began Skype has decided to overwhelmed by your financial it is not helpless now an asset of to solidify its position spend even more money

If you check the listing, my name is not there anywhere on the piece. It just shows that people are still using dynamic keyword insertion with success. Why dynamic you may ask? Because my Dad’s full name replaced mine when I looked it up in the same fashion.

I am not saying that BlackHat doesn’t pay at all. But it pays only if you know what you are doing, you know how to protect yourself, and you are darn good. But if you are a newbie who need to go to Search Engine Strategies in hope of picking up Black Hat techniques, then you can be in trouble in no time at all.