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Black-hat SEO and white-hat SEO

Submitted by chuck1 on Fri, 2009-08-21 16:31

Light gray is probably the best color

which hat will you wear?
There is a lot of talk about black-hat SEO vs. white-hat SEO. In my humble opinion, most SEO falls into the gray hat category. The whitest of hats ends up getting a little grimy, and black hats fade in the sun. The black hats fade because Uncle Goog ends up giving them a smack upside the head and de-indexing them. If you're smart, you won't engage in the practice. You don't need to. It's not as effective as the those selling crummy SEO tools would have you believe.

If you followed the link above to the About article, you have some idea about what constitutes black-hat SEO. I find the article outdated ("Keyword stuffing?" Have we been beamed back to 1997?) Momentarily, I will add some thoughts about what constitutes black-hat SEO in the Web 2.x world.

First let's define in broad strokes the differences between black-hat, gray-hat, and white-hat optimization techniques:

Black-hat SEO: Deceive the search engine spider or the web surfer, to the detriment of the web, and you're wearing a darker chapeau than you should.
Gray-hat SEO: You're engaged in some activities that are slightly deceptive but not really harmful to the web.
White-hat SEO: You're a really swell human being, and the 3 people who find your site every day know it.

OK, so what, exactly, constitutes black-hat SEO nowadays?

  • Spamming. It's perfectly OK to sell things on the web, but I really don't want to find your sales pitch for miracle heart pills on top of the results when I'm looking for information about my heart health. Neither do the search engines want me to find that page so your reign will be mercifully short.
  • Automating their spam. These guys use robots for everything. They have Twitter robots to make "Twitter friends," other social networking robots to spam the other social networks, even article writing robots to spam the article directories. Search engines seem to be cracking down hard on this, and if your page or site shows too many inorganic looking links from social networking sites too quickly, you will be smacked down and de-indexed.
  • Sabotaging. This happened to one of my sites. Google has developed services to let web surfers squeal on webmasters, and since the volume of squealing is so high, Google automates the response. Black hat SEO folks are increasingly turning to methods (which I'm not going to detail) to actively get their competitors' sites de-indexed. I really hope Google re-thinks this one. I shouldn't be punished if somebody places a bunch of links on their own dummy porn spam site to my site. (Oops -- I just gave away one of the techniques. If you think your site might have fallen victim to this type of attack, run it through Bad Neighborhood.)

A lot of the old techniques no longer work. Keyword stuffing is passe, but keyword weight still matters (a little -- I'm going to do a post on this in the next few weeks. Get the feed so you don't miss it).

What are the gray-hat SEOmeisters doing?

  • Blog and forum spamming. They place links in the comments of relevant blogs and forums to their pages to build incoming links. This is not necessarily all that bad if you're adding something to the discussion. The web, after all, is built of links.
  • Link buying. Google has been cracking down on this practice, somewhat selectively, but it can still be done effectively. They say that if the link is designed to get traffic, not just improve search authority, they have ways of figuring that out. I find this kind of uncool because if someone owns valuable web real estate, they should be able to make a buck off it -- it's not that different from advertising. Anyway, if you're buying links, you'd better be very careful about the way in which you go about it. You might want to covertly approach a popular blogger and ask them to link to you, offering a bit of a bribe. Paid directory listings can get you in trouble unless the directory is prominent (like Yahoo!).
  • Social networking spamming. A couple of years ago, search engines gave a lot of weight to incoming social networking links, the logic being that if people were sharing it, it must be good. This is still true to some extent (at least from what I see) but if you and your buddies are the only ones sharing your stuff, you'll get smacked. You have to be very selective about what you share and when you share it. Going viral is still potent SEO juice.
  • Using tools. Something like WebCEO can give you an advantage that is almost unfair. It's not un-ethical or bad for the web, but... well, try it and you'll see. (Disclosure: I stand to gain monetarily if you try WebCEO through clicking that link.)

White-hat SEO folks rely on putting good content out there and hoping that people eventually do find and share it. No matter what shade of gray your hat might be, you should still strive to produce quality content. Slow and steady still wins the race.

That, in sum, is the difference: Black hatters go for the quick and easy score. White hatters are more patient.

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