SEO expert Daniel Somers from www.seomers.com was our guest speaker for December's SIMS. Daniel talked through his experience with Blackhat SEO techniques in his profession and outside of it. Blackhat SEO is the “easy” way of having your website rank highly in search results but it's definitely not worth the risk of Google ‘punishing’ your website by removing it from search.

SEO Blackhats and their cheeky tricks 

SEO Blackhats and their cheeky tricks 

Daniel Somers shed some light into the world of SEO blackhats. Small businesses shouldn't be afraid of SEO blackhats but it's good to be aware that they exist, to make sure that your business stays away from them and be aware of the questions to ask your SEO. A quick run-through some of last night's notes:

  • 'Parasite Hosting’ hacks your website through bots or using plugins. Research what you download e.g. Wordpress plugins.
  • Buying link building tools simply isn't worth it. 
  • Dropped domains are still useful as google trust them more than the newer ones. £5 can save you £1000's.
  • False "Right To Be Forgotten" requests can put out your website out of Google searches (but this rarely happens). 
  • Negative SEO is when other businesses spam your website with backlinks for money or simply just to put your SEO in trouble with Google.
  • Local SEO cheats like virtual offices can affect your local business.
  • Social media blackhats exist. They could be fake accounts or fake stories used to generate likes, shares and traffic to their website. 

If you'd like to get in touch with the speaker about SEO blackhats, you can visit him at www.seomers.com. Thank you to everyone who came to another month of SIMS. We'll soon be posting details for the next SIMS talk in January 2016 and details about the upcoming competition for small businesses attending SIMS, but for now we'd like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  

Get news and updates about SIMS at our newly-launched website, www.simsdigitalskills.co.uk. Also click on the link to see Max's round-up for December's SIMS.

See Daniel's SEO blackhats presentation in the SIMS website. 

Here are some photos from last night's SIMS. Everyone's feeling very festive!