A great big thumbs down to Black Hat SEOIf you’re here hoping to hear any word of approval from me about using SEO to directly harm a competitor–you’d better scoot on out and don’t bother to come back!

It’s no exaggeration to say that I was horrified when I saw this post earlier, on SEO Roundtable. I wouldn’t call myself naive, but I’m truly shocked that anyone calling themselves an SEO consultant would have the temerity to admit to this kind of behavior–publicly at that.

Of course it was an anonymous admission, but now we all know that at least some SEOs are using these underhand tactics to get their clients ranking well. This is tantamount to theft in my opinion–theft of someone else’s rightful search engine positioning. I’m a great believer in ‘what goes around comes around.’ Call it karma–call it what you will. I can only think that engaging in such Black Hat practices will ultimately reflect badly on SEOs as a whole, and quite rightly too.

If you can’t get your client to rank better for chosen keywords using your skill and better judgment, then I’d say you’re patently in the wrong business. You would clearly be better off making a living as a card sharp in Las Vegas–at least then you’d be up against your own kind.

Hopefully, it’s only a matter of time before someone comes up with a formula for exposing these techniques, and then we can all publish a list of names of people who are guilty of betraying the rest of us, who work hard and honest for a living.

And if you happen to be someone in the market for SEO who thinks it’d be great to get someone like this working for you, you should be aware that on countless occasions business owners have woken up one morning to see their sites and domain names banned forever for Black Hat practices. Thousands of dollars wasted, not to mention time and reputation. It takes a great deal of time and money to recover your brand-credibility once you’ve been tainted online. In fact plenty of honest SEOs are making a killing putting right what Black Hatters have destroyed in a bid to do it faster and cheaper than anyone else.

Organic SEO may be slow and sometimes tedious, but it undoubtedly pays off in the long-run. It’s permanent and it outstrips all the Black Hat techniques eventually. Karma: what goes around really does come back round again.