Black Hat or White Hat?

[Nora McDougall-Collins]

Would you believe that even the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry has folks wearing black hats? These are the folks that will do anything they can go trick Google and other search engine into ranking their sites at the top. Instead of spending their time having a great site, they spend their time trying to get around the system with "Black Hat SEO."

Here are some snippets of text from some of their sites:
"Are you prepared to use every cut-throat trick in the book to exploit the search engines and outrank your competitors?"
"... if you need to escape the White Hat SEO Whiners ..."
"Black Hat SEO Techniques - Making Money Online by Exploiting the System"

So what is Black Hat SEO?
Others have done a great job of describing the tactics of Black Hat SEO. Here is an excerpt from an excellent article by George Ajazi:

"Keyword Stuffing - Literally the practice of repeating a keyword or words over and over again on a given web page. Google's algorithms work very hard at trying to find pages that read like normal text, not like a broken record. And they are getting better at it all the time. If they suspect you are just trying to "stuff" the content of your site with keywords, there is a good chance they'll penalize you for it.

Cloaking - Is a technique where a webmaster will have two versions of a given web page, one version that it shows the search engine spiders, and one version that it shows the regular web surfer. Highly frowned upon if the engines find out.

Invisible Text - (mentioned above) Filling a web page with text that is the same color as the background. I love this one.

Doorway Page - A highly optimized web page whose purpose is to direct traffic to other pages using either a redirect method or merely by being full of links that direct you to these other web pages.

Spam Page - Basically a doorway page that is full of ads that a webmaster makes money off of if someone clicks on them. Very annoying pages.

Interlinking - Setting up multiple websites about a given topic and having them all link to each other in order to increase their relevance and subsequently their rankings in the search engines.

Selling PageRank - If you have a high PR website, you sell links from your site to another for cash. Helping their site rank higher in Google and in turn, making your wallet fatter.

Buying Expired Domains - Buying expired websites that had some decent PageRank in order to try and keep the site's inbound links."

The rest of the article is also great reading.

The unfortunate situation is that I hear these strategies being promoted by folks that don't know any better. What do you tell another baseball parent when they are all excited about these new strategies they have learned? Another local gent is very generous and enthusiastic in passing these ideas on to others. In fact, I heard about him from other technical people several years before he showed up in one of my classes. Unfortunately, he doesn't know about the loss of respect it has earned him in the technical community. I wish he were as enthusiastic about just plain having great web sites!

So, if it sounds like a gimmick, reconsider!
If you wouldn't like to use web sites that have to con you there, don't do it to others.
Spend your time building a great business name and a great business site that people will come back to!

Have a great Easter!
From a proud White Hat SEO Whiner!

[NNFP]

Love the picture Nora! Hilarious!

Yeah, it's interesting how folks want a "quick fix" but the real ways to improve site are pretty straightforward and you just need to DO them! :-)