evilgreenmonkey

There is a growing trend within the SEO community to advertise yourself or your company as an “ethical” White Hat, denouncing Black Hat SEO as “illegal” and “immoral”. Such behaviour seems to be encouraged by the search engines; but what really is Black Hat and why is it considered a seemingly criminal practice?

The terms White Hat and Black Hat were originally used to classify computer hackers. White Hats would attempt to compromise computer systems or networks and then inform the System Administrators if a security hole was found, Black Hats would do the same, although take down or vandalise the network and not tell the owners how to fix the problem. The term was further blackened when criminal gangs who blackmailed companies and stole financial information online were also coined under this name.

How would I define Black Hat Search Engine Optimization? It’s hard to quantify and add boundaries to the techniques themselves, however a brief summary could be;
Actions taken for the benefit of a website, with the aim of improving brand recognition, ranking (how far up the search result page) or footprint (number of results returned for a search query which are linked to, or benefiting a single site/company) within search results and in the knowledge of them being against a search engine’s guidelines.

Sounds quite simple doesn’t it? Well, not really - even the most basic of SEO practices such as Link Building (requesting an inbound link with the aim of aiding a website’s ranking) is classed as Black Hat (Google, Yahoo and MSN tell you not to do it in their guidelines). Link Building is only acceptable to them if it’s purely for visitor traffic generation (i.e. you don’t mind someone sticking a nofollow attribute on the inbound link). Most White Hats do not therefore practice what they preach, unless they do not increase the number of counted links by any means other then Web Directory submission and hoping websites volunteer a link. Link Baiting (Creating compelling or controversial content and features in the hope of gaining links or traffic from other sites) is considered acceptable in most forms, as long as the aim is not mainly to increase a website’s search position.

When Larry and Sergey created the PageRank algorithm, forming the foundation of Google’s initial search ranking methodology, they saw links as the ideal way to calculate the popularity and importance of a web page. If each inbound link is counted as a vote for that page, Link Building is effectively rigging an election. With links being an important part of deciding a webpage’s worth even today, it is understandable that the search engines want to deter artificial link generation to prevent less worthy pages ranking highly and perhaps making a poorer result set for the searcher.

Black Hat SEO is no more or less than Marketing 101 - get your brand in front of the consumer and shout louder then your competitors. If I sell computers and have thousands of competitors, I’m not going to accept the opinion of a self-appointed information dictator as to whether my rival’s website is better then mine. I know that my computers are the best and want to make sure that everyone knows it. If I can rise to the top of Google, Yahoo and MSN by making myself look more popular and important then they would normally see me as (common place in the business world) - of course I’m going to take that opportunity. No Black Hat technique which comes to my mind is a criminal offence, but simply manipulating opinion. Is that unethical to the average marketer?

You may wonder why people bother using these techniques if the search engines will simply ban the website. Well, unlike the search engines want you to think - Black Hat SEO in the right hands and performed in the right way can help your bottom line without risking your brand. I’m not talking about the embarrassingly stupid hidden text cloaking that BMW used on one of their main brand sites, this simply sticks out a mile away and was probably flagged for human review at the Googleplex within a few weeks of it going live. What you should consider is that you don’t have to use your main website to initiate consumer interest or a sale. A well thought out network of anonymous and totally independent micro-sites can do the job just as nicely.

Just before publishing this article I decided to remove some top-line examples of techniques used by many Black Hats, seeing it offending the supporters of both the Black and the White camps. I welcome a day when these issues can be more openly discussed, without fear or flames.

Please remember that Black Hat SEO probably will get you banned if you don’t know what you are doing, even the top White Hat SEOs will need years of practice. I was only properly introduced to this new art form last year, and still have much to learn from the truly remarkable minds who have taught me.

Further Reading

What a Google employee thinks of Link Building and Link Baiting