Black Hats and White Hats
Wherever you read about search engine optimization you will come across the phrases black hat, white hat and even gray hat. Dictionaries tend to define ‘white hat’ as ‘hero or good man’ and this expression was probably derived from the early cowboy films where the good guys inevitably wore white hats and the baddies wore black hats. Here is a still showing the Laredo Kid (Bob Baker) with the drop on Henchman Joe (Glenn Strange) in the 1938 western ‘The Last Stand’.
White hat SEOs adhere to the letter of the search engine guidelines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and black hat SEOs will use any method they can to promote their site while trying to avoid getting banned. Gray hats are somewhere in between these two extremes.
So what sort of things constitute black hat SEO? There are three main areas where black hat SEOs operate.
The most common area is hidden text which is text that is embedded in the html code and seen by the search engines but not seen by website visitors. You can see some real examples of the many techniques used in this previous post hidden text.
The second area is showing one page to the search engines and a different page to humans. This is called cloaking and one method in particular is used almost exclusively, it is called IP cloaking. Here a software switch monitors the IP address of a user and compares it to a database of known Search Engine IP addresses. If the IP address is not recognized as belonging to a Search Engine the user is switched to pages designed for human consumption. If the IP address is determined to be from a search engine it is allowed to proceed to pages that have been specially designed for search engines only. If you want to know more about this technique you can read about commercial software available for IP cloaking at KloakIt and fantomas.
The third area of operation is content generation. Here the black hat SEO takes content (freely available articles from a database for example) and uses software to rewrite them automatically to produce original and unique keyword rich content for the search engines. You can see examples of such sophisticated software here and here. Content generation is even offered on external servers like TurboSM and it has now become possible to generate millions of pages for thousands of domains with very little effort. Adendum: August 30, 2006. Content generation software is getting better or so it seems from the look of this product here.
None of these techniques are useful for small business owners or anyone interested in the long term optimization of their site. It is however important to know that they exist and if you do come across your competition using such methods here is what you can do Google, Yahoo and MSN.
protheus said,
March 27, 2006 @ 4:16 pm
Just to add a grain of salt to this soup, i think that relevance is something that is the most important factor to this whole hat thing. Getting your content to search engines is the most important thing and exactly what they want, i think that the worst black hat tactic is using a PG related keywords to deliver traffic to XXX related websites. This is clear deception and lead to polution of the index. I know that google is geting better at eliminating this sort of behavior but it does still happen.
Another factor that is important to consider is the industry your website targets, if you are going to be with the Travel or Insurance boys you can’t use local e-commerce tactics. The same goes for the sites categorize as PPG or (Pill Porn and Gambling) these industries require some skills that most will consider black hat and withouth these there is no chance of success.
duz said,
March 27, 2006 @ 9:01 pm
Good points protheus. The PPG sectors have some of the most ingenious black hats I have ever met but I’ve noticed recently that they are finding it increasingly difficult to come up with new ideas. Black hats in these sectors now have a working life that is a cross between ‘Gunfight At The Ok Coral’ and ‘Groundhog Day’
protheus said,
March 29, 2006 @ 8:44 am
Sometimes i think that the Black hats are winning in the PPG sector but i look at some clear and informative sites that are using nothing but content (as far as I can tell) and normal marketing techniques that acheive great results and i wonder. Then I go to Yahoo or MSN and it’s a mess of non sensical websites.
On another topic …
It kind of brings me to a mistake I made last week i reformated my home PC and put it online to get the windows update and instead that machine was completly infected with every trojan / virus / adware you can imagine. It was eye opening to realize that under this hood of this internet that we all love and use everyday there is this jungle where it’s every man for himself.
protheus said,
March 29, 2006 @ 5:09 pm
I would love your opinion on something, I work on these two websites: coral.co.uk and eurobet.com, i know these websites have all the problems in the world when it comes to seo and as such i am trying my best not only to change the way the websites are made but also the culture behind the way they were made. Now my question is this when i do a seach on google (uk of course) for Coral then i find coral.co.uk in the 2-5 spot depending on a bunch of factors, now when i do a search for eurobet i find coral ? I don’t understand how these websites got so intertwined that a search for one results in the other. Could you shed some light on this for me?
thanks
duz said,
March 30, 2006 @ 8:56 pm
protheus -
>….I know these websites have all the problems in the world when it comes to seo and as such i am trying my best not only to change the way the websites are made but also the culture behind the way they were made.
I think that is very sensible because when I took a quick look to see if there was an easy answer to your question I saw some of the problems you mention
>when I do a search for eurobet I find coral ?
What page of eurobot.com are you expecting to see? http://www.eurobet.com/sb.go?page=index&lang=1&sid=1&ms=MS perhaps?
protheus said,
March 31, 2006 @ 8:37 am
I have worked in Online gambling a long time and i have never worked on a harder project, sometimes i wish i was just a contractor instead of a salaried worked so i could just choose the projects i want. I think it will take about 18 months to get this site working for search engines, it’s a case study in bad design with all the boxes ticked, dynamic urls with unecessary variables, javascript navigation, javascript linking, no defined structured, linking based on affiliates id’s, redirections all over the place, and no content at all.
Really i wanted your impression of the problem because i do understand it but it’s a daunting task sometimes (even thought the money is good) it’s the greatest challenge of my short life.
ocseoexpert said,
July 24, 2006 @ 7:50 am
To Protheus’ comment, you should consider validating each keyword optimized page of your website using an SEO Best Practices checklist. I have one in my ebook, The Four Layers of the SEO Model: How to Rank Higher in the Search Engines (http://fourlayers.com/).
One of my clients, PokerFacesUSA.com just landed “poker player directory”, 1st place in Google, so you can win even if you are competing against the Gods of Gambling.
Michael,
I appreciate the White Hat vs Black Hat comparison. I think what it comes down to, now that the SE’s and the Internet Marketing industry have matured, is basic economics: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”.
To win, we’ve got to follow all the SEO Best Practices and additionally pay the piper for inclusion in several pay-as-you-go directories. DMOZ and Alexa are fundamental, but thanks to “link aging” we should all factor in timing when it comes to SEO and not just blow our entire budget in one month on links that won’t matter in a year.
Thanks for the great post!
Cheers,
Steve Wiideman
PS-I gave the finger to these same basic economics principles when I launched my free websites program at http://www.free-websites.us. I guess that’s why I keep getting all these crazy awards from Career.org and local politicians. All the Best!
duz said,
July 24, 2006 @ 3:38 pm
Steve, thank you for your comments. I hate to poop the party but top of the Google SERPs for |poker player directory| is not difficult. An EXACT query gives only 21 pages and only one site for allinanchor EXACT, which is yours. You may think “you can win even if you are competing against the Gods of Gambling” but in this case they are not competing with you
The current street price for SEOing a legitimate, high quality poker playing site to the top is $1M+ and the number of people who are capable of doing it without problems could fit on a Greyhound bus.
Web Writing THAT SHOULD NOT BE! | Blue Ferret Communications said,
February 26, 2008 @ 10:10 pm
[…] Sites like that are geared strictly toward grabbing traffic through Time-Sensitive SEO, but in a way that’s both hopelessly skewed and borderline illegal. Fortunately, we now have a term for this: Black hat SEO. […]