Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO
Everyone wants to be an overnight success. In the ultra-competitive world of the internet it can be very tempting to use SEO tactics that aren’t entirely aboveboard if it means getting a lot of traffic and a high page rank all at once. Website owners should be very wary of using black hat techniques for websites. This is not just a case of taking a moral stand against black hat SEO, but because black hat SEO can actually do more harm than good for a lot of website owners.
The main thing to understand about black hat SEO is who is using these techniques. It is not the owner of a sole ecommerce site or blog – or even a group of sites in different niches. It is most often used by site owners of affiliate marketing sites that border on spam sites. If the site is banned by Google, the back hat site owner does not try and get the site reinstated into Google’s index, he just moves on and creates a new site. If you’re a site owner of a business’s main web presence, this is absolutely not how you should be running your site. Chances are you’ve taken pains to secure a good URL and site design. Having to start everything over from scratch makes little sense. But this is how black hatters operate.
Still, here’s a big secret about black hat tactics: they’re effective. The issue is not if black hat tactics work or not (they do) but how long they work. Currently, Google’s spiders aren’t very bright: they’re scouring the web using yesterday’s definitions of what is allowable by websites. It can take weeks for Google to catch up with new black hat tactics. In this way, black hat optimizers are something like people who design web viruses. They’re always trying to stay one step ahead of anti-virus programs. Black hatters try to stay one step ahead of Google’s algorithm.
Even if black hat optimizers are effective for a month, or even much longer, Google will eventually catch up and ban the site from the index. Let’s take a simple example: an early tactic in SEO was to have a long list of keywords (including totally unrelated keywords) in the footer of the site. Google then improved its algorithm to catch this type of trickery. No site owner would think about using this tactic today, but this early black hat tactic was effective for a short period.
In sum, black hat tactics are normally for site owners looking to make some quick money on an affiliate site, then moving onto another affiliate site after Google bans the first. It is absolutely not for the flagship site of a business, as that business cannot afford the downtime if Google bans that site from the index. Getting back into Google’s index is a long, drawn-out process that can take many months for a site to be fully activated, once the offending tactics have been removed.
White Hat SEO
So what’s the alternative? White hat SEO. It’s certainly a slower process, but in this case slow and steady wins the race. In the long run it’s preferable to black hat SEO, as you won’t ever have to fear a dreaded Google banning. Basic things you can do:
1. Provide informative web content with keywords at 3% of overall content.
2. Use social bookmarks to create backlinks to internal web pages.
3. Correspond with bloggers and people in the media to get in-content backlinks.
4. Add the site to directories (still moderately effective).
5. Participate in forums and other social networks.
That’s a very abbreviated list, but it takes hours of time and effort each day – or the resources to hire someone to do the same. If you’re willing to put in the time and resources, your traffic, conversions, and page rank will rise and you won’t ever have to worry about being banned by Google.
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