The dangers of engaging in Black Hat SEO practices, or hiring a SEO firm that uses Black Hat techniques, are twofold:
Firstly, Google is constantly changing their algorithm to eliminate various Black Hat SEO practices. Sometimes they’re very successful, and other times they’re only moderately successful. But in general we see sites that use Black Hat SEO are very volatile — they do a bunch of Black Hat SEO work and surge up in rankings for a few weeks or even months, then Google unrolls a new algorithm and their rankings plummet back down.
The second danger has both a smaller chance of happening, but carries a much more serious risk. If Google determines that you’re engaged in Black Hat practices in violation of their Webmaster Guidelines, they could decide to punish you by radically lowering your ranking, or delisting your site entirely. If your site is delisted, you will not show up in any Google rankings at all.
Now, Google doesn’t have a team of people hunting down sites that violate their guidelines. They don’t need to, because your competition can just report you to Google. Then Google will investigate and if they decide you’re using Black Hat techniques — and even if it’s your SEO firm doing it, you’re still responsible — they’ll remove you from their search engine or radically lower your rankings.
Ultimately even if you’re not worried about the chance of being delisted, the Black Hat SEO shortcut to rankings is usually not worth it in the end. You end up doing tons of work, or paying for all kinds of links, only to have the next Google algorithm change remove all benefit from that work and those links.
Then you start over again, exploiting the next hole in the Google algorithm until Google closes that hole too. In the end you’re jumping up to the first page, then falling down to the 50th page, then up and down and up and down endlessly.
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