White Hat and Black Hat Search Engine Optimisation Techniques Explained

As long as search engines have existed, the debate has raged over white hat and black hat search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques. Some website owners and SEO companies are willing to go as far as is necessary in the pursuit of high search engine placements, while others take a more long-term 'ethical' approach to representing their websites and their clients.

If you search online you will soon notice that as well as the 'should you/shouldn't you?' or a 'dare you/daren't you?' arguments and discussions, much of the web chatter revolves around what actually constitutes White Hat and Black Hat SEO in the first place. Discussing 'shades of grey' in this context is a strange debate in many ways, as the guideline and regulations are all clearly defined by the various search engines. In reality there's very little need for debate as adherence to the guidelines will result in White Hat SEO and deviation from them or ignoring them will lead to Black Hat SEO. Violate any of the guidelines and you risk having the site removed from the index. That's pretty black and white.

At SEO Consult we see it clearly. If a website is optimised for humans it is sure to get high rankings. Good for business. If it is designed to trick search engines into believing it has more search value than it really does it may also get high rankings, but the difference is that it will be found out and will be punished. Very bad for business.

Some people may be happy to 'churn and burn'. We don't do that.

Here are some black hat techniques to be avoided:

• Buying Links - bought links gives extra weight to the promoted page in the search engine algorithms. The paid-for link adds no extra value to visitors.
• Cyber Hoaxing - a technique used with affiliate programs. A fake news site hosts a hard to prove or disprove sensational fake new story, submitted across a range of social media sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, etc. The basic idea is to generate a buzz and get links to your fake news story even capitalizing on the outrage of the setup.
• Keyword Stuffing/Hidden Text - defined as stuffing a page with keywords and keyword phrases that can be read by search engine spiders, but not by human visitors. They can be located in a hidden div tag, coloured so that they blend into the background, or even placed within HTML comment tags. Old school and increasingly ineffective.
• Doorway pages - these are web pages with the sole aim of being spidered by search engines and included in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Usually named after the primary keyword being targeted, they are often stuffed with keywords and created in bulk. They will likely have a form of meta refresh tag or JavaScript redirection, sending visitors to the 'money site'.
• Web Page Cloaking - cloaking is a technique that shows a doorway page to search engine spiders but the 'money page' to human visitors. Both pages are accessed using the same URL with software used to identify the search engine spiders and serve the doorway page to them. Competitors are kept from scraping the content of the optimised doorways, and human visitors are kept from seeing the ugly doorway pages.
• 302 Redirect Hijacking - the creation of a web page on a high-page-rank domain with a 302 redirect to the page trying to be hijacked. Spiders follow the redirect to the second page and indexes it, but on the SERP, the URL of the indexed page will be that of the page with the redirect.
• Scraping and Spinning - this is software that grabs content, paraphrases, randomizes, and generates 'new' content. Often it will contain links to being promoted. Spinning content into duplicate-content-penalty-avoiding text is considered the holy grail of black hat techniques.
• Splogs - close cousins to scraping and spinning, splogs are simply meaningless, worthless blogs with automatically generated content. Many splogs read RSS feeds and create a blog automatically. Splogs can be used to get other sites indexed or their PageRank increased by including links to them. It is estimated that over 20% of online blogs are actually splogs.

Last and not least:

• Link Spamming/spamdexing - this is a way of getting links through the use of automated software, which accesses unprotected blogs through anonymous web proxies and leaves links in their comments.

To an extent the search engines are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand they try to be as transparent as possible to help site owners, but not so transparent that they provide so much information that those so inclined can game the system.

It's essentially a business decision as to whether an SEO company or webmaster chooses to pursue a policy of adherence to the stated guidelines or to work beyond them. Techniques that violate the guidelines aren't White Hat. They may be effective, commonplace, non-deceptive or justified in the short term, but that doesn't make them White Hat. If your business objectives, timescales and reasoning can support Black Hat SEO then go for it, but remember that Black Hat SEO puts the site at risk of being removed from the search index. Not only that but Black Hat SEO begs the questions, 'what is SEO?' and 'what are you trying to achieve?' If you view SEO as a long-term project, then it's creating quality content that's the most relevant result for a desired query, supporting the content in a topical environment with quality relevant inbound links. If making sure that the site can be easily crawled and indexed by search engines with light, tight code then perhaps Black Hat SEO isn't for you.

People can get very judgmental when it comes to SEO referring to it as ethical or non-ethical. At the end of the day SEO is about results, it's about delivering business objectives to customers, professionally and over the long term. At SEO consult we're as creative as we have to be to give our clients a competitive edge. However, we won't jeopardise their Internet presence in the process for the sake of a 'quick fix' solution.

Visit www.seo-mama.com