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Black Hat SEO

What defines black-hat SEO, or even whether the concept really exists at all, is a subject of debate amongst SEO experts. Black-hatters say that ethics do not come into the SEO as any optimizations made to a website are done as a deliberate effort to manipulate search engine results pages. The point of commercial websites, they say, is to make money and to do this they must rank more highly within search engines than their competition. It is up to the search engines to set the parameters of acceptable optimization. The end justifies the means. Others counter that any optimizations that cause a site to rank more highly than its content would otherwise justify or that any changes made specifically for search engines that do not improve the user's experience of the site are black-hat SEO.

The various search engines themselves set certain guidelines for what they view as acceptable use. These vary and are deliberately vague so as not to give away too much about the algorithms used and to provide a catch-all. For example Yahoo! bans 'pages that provide a poor user experience'. A very wide ranging and subjective category. However if you step too far over the mark you should not be surprised if your site is penalized or even removed from the index. To further muddy the waters it should be remembered that just as a search engine has no obligation to list your website you have no obligation to abide by the letter of their guidelines. No contract for services has been signed. Most of the websites I have worked on have been indexed through the search engine finding the pages from an inbound-link not through a formal submission process. This supports the attitude that content, layout and structure are the owner's choice and responsibility.

Purely commercial sites, such as online shops, often have little content beyond the products they sell. Adding product reviews, especially where they are generated by users can add useful content. However for most products commercial sites operate in a highly competitive and global marketplace and have to resort to more aggressive SEO techniques in order to rank well. At the extreme end are the 'adult content' sites. These frequently use bait-and-switch techniques through doorway pages and have pioneered many other examples of black-hat optimizations. They operate on quantity, knowing that a small percentage will stay and register on the site even if they were searching for something else.

For many websites high search engine rankings are not the only factor. Many want a sticky website, one that the user will explore and come back to later. For a commercial site this will hopefully translate into sales of some kind. This means using search engine optimization that represents the site properly and does not interfere with this secondary goal. For example creating a doorway page that hooks people querying for information on Basketball won't please most users if it then leads to information about Women's Health Issues.

Further Information

Yahoo! Search Site Guidelines: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html

Google Information on Search Engine Optimizers: http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

MSN Search Guidelines for Webmasters: http://search.msn.com/webmasters/guidelines.aspx

Lycos Web Promotion: http://webmaster.lycos.co.uk/topics/technic/referencement/referencement-workshop7/1/

Black Hat SEO

Further Information

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