Thursday, June 16, 2005
Black hat or white?
In an seo forum I visited today, someone railed against search engine optimization professionals as being just a bunch of people trying to trick the search engines in order to gain high rankings.
Which brings up the topic of black hat seos versus white hat seos. A black hat is the kind of seo professional the forum member was talking about. Black hats try to find loopholes to gain high rankings dishonestly. Eventually, they caught and the sites they optimize get banned. At which point, the black hats discard the banned sites and build new ones to try to find some new loophole.
White hats try to figure out exactly what the search engines want and optimize their pages to conform to that. They try to provide valuable content to customers and see their sites as the equivalent of a lifelong marriage instead of a disposable, one-night stand.
In my opinion, black hats are merely compulsive gamblers who get an adrenaline rush out of "beating" the search engines. They ensure themselves of having a continuing game by using techniques that will eventually get them caught. Then they can move on to obtain the next "win," this time using another unsuspecting client's money.
So they feed their habit of gambling against the search engines by finding an ongoing string of suckers to stake them to their next game.
You can probably guess by now that I don't like black hat seos. But I'm not going to get all self-righteous on you with how pure and noble the white hats, to which I aspire, are.
That's because I don't believe there are any true white hats—only lighter shades of gray.
See, if you truly go by the guideline Google lays out of, "don't do anything to your site that you wouldn't do if there were no search engines to get better rankings in," you wouldn't do anything. You wouldn't research keywords to find what people are searching for. You wouldn't optimize your site to make sure that your pages clearly communicate that they are about whatever keywords you are targeting for those pages.
You wouldn't go out of your way to find sites to link to or sites to seek links from. You would simply put up your site blindly and hope for the best.
I try to be as light a shade of gray as I can be when it comes to optimizing, but I realize that the desire to get high rankings is still a motivating factor for me and that it guides me to spend a couple of days each month finding ways to improve pages and their rankings.
But I can't quite see myself as the pure-as-the-driven-snow white hat that a lot of colleagues portray themselves as. And maybe that's why I try to draw a firm line regarding what I'll do and what I won't to get results. I know my weaknesses and want to keep them in check. And hopefully, that will serve as white enough.
Jeff
In an seo forum I visited today, someone railed against search engine optimization professionals as being just a bunch of people trying to trick the search engines in order to gain high rankings.
Which brings up the topic of black hat seos versus white hat seos. A black hat is the kind of seo professional the forum member was talking about. Black hats try to find loopholes to gain high rankings dishonestly. Eventually, they caught and the sites they optimize get banned. At which point, the black hats discard the banned sites and build new ones to try to find some new loophole.
White hats try to figure out exactly what the search engines want and optimize their pages to conform to that. They try to provide valuable content to customers and see their sites as the equivalent of a lifelong marriage instead of a disposable, one-night stand.
In my opinion, black hats are merely compulsive gamblers who get an adrenaline rush out of "beating" the search engines. They ensure themselves of having a continuing game by using techniques that will eventually get them caught. Then they can move on to obtain the next "win," this time using another unsuspecting client's money.
So they feed their habit of gambling against the search engines by finding an ongoing string of suckers to stake them to their next game.
You can probably guess by now that I don't like black hat seos. But I'm not going to get all self-righteous on you with how pure and noble the white hats, to which I aspire, are.
That's because I don't believe there are any true white hats—only lighter shades of gray.
See, if you truly go by the guideline Google lays out of, "don't do anything to your site that you wouldn't do if there were no search engines to get better rankings in," you wouldn't do anything. You wouldn't research keywords to find what people are searching for. You wouldn't optimize your site to make sure that your pages clearly communicate that they are about whatever keywords you are targeting for those pages.
You wouldn't go out of your way to find sites to link to or sites to seek links from. You would simply put up your site blindly and hope for the best.
I try to be as light a shade of gray as I can be when it comes to optimizing, but I realize that the desire to get high rankings is still a motivating factor for me and that it guides me to spend a couple of days each month finding ways to improve pages and their rankings.
But I can't quite see myself as the pure-as-the-driven-snow white hat that a lot of colleagues portray themselves as. And maybe that's why I try to draw a firm line regarding what I'll do and what I won't to get results. I know my weaknesses and want to keep them in check. And hopefully, that will serve as white enough.
Jeff
Comments:
Post a Comment
© 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 Jeff Baas, One Stop Web Support
