Anybody who has grown up watching western movies and TV shows know that the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black ones.  Why would I be writing about hat colors on a website dedicated to life insurance?  It’s simply that some folks wearing black hats “done us wrong (forgive the western parlance).”   The scary thing about this is the black hats were invisible to us until we suffered the results of their nefarious efforts.

As a website dedicated to marketing life insurance, our main marketing efforts have always been concentrated on getting noticed in the Search Engines, mainly Google.  As we are “life insurance people” and knew nothing about how to do this, we always hired people and companies to help us with these efforts.  Search engine optimization (SEO) companies seemed to grow out of the woodwork, so it wasn’t difficult to find “experts” to help us with our efforts.

We seemed to find the right folks to work with in the beginning (and for many years thereafter), as we rose up to first page prominence for many of the key terms people use to search for life insurance.  Business was great, we were hiring lots of people, moved into larger quarters and were very optimistic about our future.

Then, the men in black hats rode into town and changed everything.  Unfortunately, a lot of black hats come disguised in white ones.  One of the companies we hired (who came highly recommended, by the way), started doing things that were not in keeping with Google’s published Webmaster Guidelines.  For those of you who don’t own and operate websites, these are specific do’s and don’ts which Google publishes to let webmasters know what is and isn’t acceptable behavior in regard to search engine optimization.  Activities that follow these guidelines are considered White Hat tactics, while activities that violate these guidelines are considered to be Black Hat tactics.  Unbeknownst to us, this very expensive SEO Company had resorted to black hat tactics and the results were disastrous.

One day, we occupied much sought after real estate on the first page of Google and other search engines.  The next day, we were banned to the “Siberia” of Google – to pages deep in the search for our most favorable terms.  Eighteen months later we still haven’t fully recovered.  As a result of these Black-hatted bastards, we have lost millions of dollars in revenue, have been forced to lay off employees and have been fighting for our survival in an economy that has already made it difficult for companies to survive.    Perhaps even worse is that the company responsible was unwilling to help in the cleanup, which required removing thousands of bad links from the web.  They were unwilling to own up to the harm they had caused. It has been an expensive and arduous cleanup process, one I wouldn’t wish on our biggest competitors.  The sad part of this is, none of this came about as a result of how we operate our business.  We have testimonials from hundreds of our clients thanking us for the tremendous service we provide.  Our mistake was our naiveté. We will not make this mistake again.

The good news is we are going to survive and continue providing our excellent level of service to folks in need of life insurance.  For our own survival, we have immersed ourselves in the business of SEO, specifically in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.  Yes, we are still going to hire outside firms to help us in these matters, but you can be best assured that our vetting process will be a lot more stringent than it was previously.  And, while we don’t like to micro-manage folks we hire to do any type of work for us, the knowledge we have gained by learning the ropes the hard way will keep us vigilant for anybody riding into town wearing a black hat.