May 06
With the verticals that I work in, you tend to find the most aggressive forms of SEO - often by affiliates using techniques that the brands themselves would never dream of experimenting with. This goes further than the everyday world of Black Hat SEO, to a place where the lines of ethics and morality really do become blurred. The topic often crops up in SEO forums and blogs, although few people seem to know how it’s done. So let’s explore a couple of ways in which a spammy page on a trusted domain can rank top for a competitive search term.
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?