What is Blacklisted?

What does Black-listed mean to a website owner?  I get involved in conversations about the dangers of out-of-control SEO that can lead to blacklisting all the time.  But most people don’t understand the scope of what it means to have your website black-listed by search engines.

Blacklisted is an older verb than the Internet, so context is easy to understand.  For website owners, Blacklisting means your website is removed from the search engine(s) index.  Which means that even if someone searches for your website, it won’t show in the search results.

If you have a typical website that gets 75% or more of its traffic from natural search results, that’s a significant drop in visitors.  For that reason search engines don’t want to blacklist websites willy-nilly. They take it just as seriously as you do.   That’s why its not easy to get blacklisted.

There are only a few ways you will get blacklisted.  Usually its because you have employed a blatant trick on the search engines.  Something you really have to work at.  So the assumption is, if you do get caught playing a trick on a search engine, you deserved it.

So is there a reason to worry?

There are third party services that are paid to promote websites – SEO Services.  You may think to employ one to help improve your search rank.  SEO services often go right up again the line between whitehat (acceptable) and blackhat (bad) SEO practices.  Sometimes they step over the line.  Therefore, its important to know exactly what a vendor will do to promote your website before you engage them. Unfortunately SEO service is often considered a proprietary service/art/science by these vendors.  They will often tell you flat-out “its proprietary.  We don’t want our competition to know how we do things.”

SEO is not a secret art.  SEO is doing a lot of simply things – that are really hard to do.  You should not be afraid to demand explicit answers to your direct questions.  If an SEO vendor will not tell you how they do “their thing”, go elsewhere.  The old-timers in SEO will tell you there is nothing proprietary about it.  Its just hard work.

There are some very reputable SEOs out there.  Unfortunately the way marketing tends to work (and remember that SEOs are marketeers) you tend to be bombarded by pitches from those SEOs who are probably only in it to make the big-quick bucks, while the quality SEOs are too busy to contact you because they get more than enough work by referral.

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