Can blackhat SEO really get you banned from google?

[Colin]

Okay, I need some of you who know what your talking about to tell me if Blackhat SEO can get your site banned from google, What I am speaking of is methods such as the Magic Traffic Bot that pings websites telling them that the referer is my site and the ones that list top referrers help my rankings...
Now can that get my site banned from Google? ...I think it could BUT the thing I wonder is, Can't I just do the same thing with my competitor's site and get them banned from Google? Thats the reason I wonder how true the claims are... Please let me know , Thanks.

[Webmaster S]

If another person report your site you may easy banned otherwise nothing happens. And it will provide no value in the long term trying to cheat google. The better you work on developing good content that google index.

[Insanetray573]

I must respectfully disagree with the previous poster.

Search engines can detect a variety of black hat tactics including invisible text (invisible to human eyeballs, any way), HTML title tags that mislead spiders, keyword stuffing and other offenses.

If a search engine bot suspects illegal practices, your site will be banned or sanctioned, i.e. not a good idea to even try to fool Google.

Take care,
Paul Lalley
editor@webwordslinger

[memetrader]

Both the previous answers have some element of truth but not the complete picture.

Firstly Google can ban sites algorithmically, for example hidden text http://www.seo-blog.com/hidden-text.php

Secondly Google can ban sites after manual inspection, euphemistically called a handjob in the SEO industry.

Sites reported to Google through the spam report form http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html are not usually eyeballed (maybe one in ten thousand). They are put into a database of known spam and then this database is used to improve the spam detection component of the algorithm.

Now, the technique you describe is called referrer spam and only used by people who have absolutely no understanding of how search engines work, so I would forget about it if I was you

You are right, referrer spam is not algorithmically detectable by Google and therefore cannot be used by your competitors to harm your site's rankings.

Magic Traffic Bot is widely available for $5 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=566142 and even if it was free or they paid you a thousand dollars to use it, no professional SEO would touch it under any circumstances. That should tell you something....

Good luck!

[Peace]

yes but it takes some time

Regards
http://www.smab.org/