White, Grey, and Black Hat SEO
Proper search engine optimization or “SEO” practices are a hot topic in the internet world. With so many people trying to find the swift fix to generating web traffic, we often see freelance optimizers that cut corners and swerve to the realm of “Black Hat” SEO.
Black Hat SEO is basically any optimization strategy which violates search engine guidelines governing best practices for appropriate site optimization. Black Hat SEO is becoming an increasingly large problem with the ever growing number of websites online. This problem persists because clients are not well versed in proper search engine optimization methods. It should be the responsibility of the SEO consultant to educate their clients, putting their fears to rest about shady methods.
In the world of SEO, there are three types of optimization, White Hat, Grey Hat and Black Hat optimization. I’ll do my best to break them down for you.
White Hat search engine optimizers are people who strictly stick to the proper methods set down by the search engines, ensuring your website will not only rise in position for pre-defined keywords, but also remain in the indexes without fear of penalization due to improper methods. For a company seeking to actively pursue SEO, these are the ideal people to have handling your project. White Hat optimizers will only use tactics that are proven to work and will never impact your website in a negative fashion.
Grey Hat search engine optimizers walk a fine line between what is and is not suitable. While their methods do not directly violate any search engines guidelines, they are constantly pushing the limits of what is considered proper practices. Those who actively engage in Grey Hat optimization tend to have great success with projects. They constantly review search engine guidelines to ensure they are not in direct violation of the search engines guidelines, keeping their clients websites in the clear without penalization. One slip however, and a website can easily find itself being banned from the search engines. Grey Hat SEO does present a certain level of risk for all its potential success. It’s also a risk due to constant changing of rules applied by search engines.
Black Hat search engine optimizers will blatantly violate the search engines guidelines governing proper optimization. They simply do not care if a website is banned. These are people who are normally after the quick results. Black Hat SEO is pretty much guaranteed to get your website listed in one of the top three positions of any major search engine.
However, your site will most likely be banned swiftly, effectively ending an SEO campaign. Black Hatters often use tactics such as the following:
• Keyword, Anchor Text and Domain Name Stuffing
• Using hidden text or links. These can be hidden in the ALT attributes of images or made the same color as the page background so they appear invisible to the end user. Style Sheets (CSS Spam) can be used in an attempt to hide these manipulations from search engine’s anti-spam filters.
• Using techniques to artificially increase the number of links to your page, such as link farms or buying and selling links with the main aim of increasing rankings in results pages
• Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate the apparent popularity
• Cloaking, delivering different pages depending the IP address and/or agent who is requesting it
• Doorway/Gateway/Jump Pages - pages designed as an entrance to a website, each one of them optimized for a different keyword but which have no real content. These automatically redirect the user to the main website. This tactic is heavily used by adult content sites. Often with a Javascript mouseover redirect that sends the user to the new page as soon as the cursor hovers over the page content
• Duplicate Content. Identical or very similar pages that can be accessed from different URLs. Examples would be copies of the Open Directory Project listings or online books taken from Project Gutenberg. Someone could even steal the content of your website! Google has registered patent number: 6,658,423 aimed at detecting duplicates.
• Auto-generated content of no value to the end user. The aim being to either target keywords or to create excessive internal links
• Misuse or cyber-squatting of competitor domain names or name typos, for example: Microsofr.com
• Spamming Forums and Blogs
• Excessive outbound links to websites that use high risk techniques or Spam
• Hiding outbound-links either with Javascript or by redirecting to a gateway page blocked by a robots.txt file
These are only some of the tactics used by Black Hat optimizers. Their methods are many, and their morals are few. These people will take your money, deliver temporary results and run.
The focus of this article is to help make companies aware of the perils in the online world and educate them so they can make the right choice in selecting a consultant to handle their SEO projects. Never be afraid to ask questions and find out exactly how your SEO will be handled. Don’t be taken unawares by people offering the quick fix. There is no quick fix when it comes to search engine optimization. Proper SEO takes time and attention to detail.
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Wow, hiding outbound-links by redirecting to a robot.txt banned page is quite clever. Amazing people make money providing “SEO” as consultants.