White Hat and Black Hat SEO

If you have done some research on the Internet, you may have come across terms such as "Black hat" and "White hat" search engine optimization. We will explain our take on what makes a SEO firm ethical and effective in the long run opposite to quick-trick techniques that can get your site banned and disappear from the search engines all together.

Black Hat Search Engine Optimization

This term refers to an array of techniques tuned to cut corners and "fool" search engines into ranking a particular website as very relevant for a particular search. We will only mention a few of these "tricks":

Invisible text: A page contains text the same color as the background (usually very small) that repeats the target keywords ad nauseam to make a search engine think the site is rich with content. Problem: search engines have long caught up with it and can recognize hidden text. People have tried to get around this spamming technique by slightly modifying the text color so that it is different in the eye of a robot but still imperceptible to the human eye. Do not do this! Not only search engines are getting smarter but someone could see the trick and report it, especially if the site has become prominent.

Cloaking: There is software out here that can "serve" customized web pages to spiders. These pages are made "ad hoc" and never seen by a web surfer. Their purpose is to make search engines think the website is relevant with lots of content. Cloaking may work if it is done right and with good software but we strongly believe search engines are getting to the point of being able to discover even the most sophisticated cloaking. The German site for BMW was kicked out of the results of Google in early 2006 for employing such a technique, which is proof that no matter how prestigious a company it is, if a site isn't playing by the rules it will pay.

Shadow domains: make enough domains with virtually the same content but variations in title, description and keyword density and eventually one or more will hit the jackpot. Very risky, because both search engines and people can easily find out if there is duplicate content. Also, Google will put new domains in the sandbox to reduce quick, get-to-the top schemes.

Consequences of Bad SEO

We have seen sites being banned for much less than what we outlined above. We also have seen sites dropping from position 1 into the 50s and 60s (for a very competitive term) because they made the mistake of exchanging with link farms and other heavily penalized sites. You may petition a search engine to be reinstated if an honest mistake was made that lead to the ban. Do not get to that point. Being reinstated is not that easy.

White Hat SEO

Writing keyword rich content that is very useful to readers is paramount. Looking at code and making sure it complies with html standards, and conducting a legitimate linking strategy that includes directory submission, content distribution, and high quality link partnering are the keys to high rankings. Keep the site fresh by adding new pages to encourage continuous spidering and updating by the search engine. There are dozens of other methods to increase the chances of high rankings that we won't get into here, but the main point of white-hat, or ethical, search engine optimization is not to trick the search engines but to instead offer exactly what they are looking for: a) great content, and b) a "popular" site in terms of other sites that link to it.