August 22, 2007 21:03
Category: Optimizing
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I like Mike Grehan's insights into ever-evolving search marketing scenario. Despite maintaining busy schedule as evidenced often in his writings, his articles give a wide-angle view of the goings on in the search world.
His treat on black hat SEO is a good example. For a person like me, stationed in India with no prompt access to industry-level conferences and deliberations, I look for cues in online publications to understand how and where the search world is headed. ClickZ is one of them.
Before reading Mike's account (link above) I have been living with the idea that black hat SEO is mostly on the decline. This has stemmed from my understanding that since all major search engines spend fortunes on research and development to block and ban pages that seek backdoor entry into the top search rankings, it is in their interest to see the end of black hat SEO.
From search engines' standpoint this is entirely conceivable because their business is to provide the most relevant results to the surfers, and in the process reject the spurious attention seekers.
Mike's article however throws light on the fact that black hat SEO is indeed alive and kicking. What happens is that the techniques change, but the objective remains the same.
It's like a cat-and-mouse game, which never seems to cease as long as each survives the onslaught of the other. Refer Wikipedia for a thorough understanding of black hat SEO.
That being so how does black hat SEO play out in reality? Is it something that is so omnipresent that all one has to do is to simply pick up an expert from many loitering in the Internet? Not really.
The fact is practitioners of black hat SEO are a secretive lot. One has to know the signs in the 'dark' alleys to identify a good hand. And then there is always the question as to how much black you want your means to be. Is it simple page cloaking? Or is it sinister than that?
Whatever it is, one thing I know for sure. For a lay website owner, Ralph Tegtmeier's ingenious way of generating large volume of TrackBack links to own blogs (refer Mike's article) or Google's supposedly unintentional cloaking of pages on its own search engine are too technical to understand and try out.
Fortunately, the white hat SEO hasn't much changed over the years, and is not difficult to follow and implement. Tedious it surely is, requiring great amount of ongoing effort, but possible to do nevertheless.
My guess is that many website owners, finding the going tough in the normal way, get lured by the prospect of sudden riches by way of rampaging footfalls that the black hat SEO promises.
But as Mike Grehan says the risk is too high for small websites (or any website for that matter). It is tempting to fall for black hat SEO when you come across Tegtmeier saying, "A good black hat can out-white a white hat any day of the week." It is like the call of the wild with a magnet-like pull into a world of unknown.
Should you fall for black hat SEO for some quick spoils that border on the danger of getting banned? Or would you toil hard with white hat SEO that makes any early headway an impossibly uphill task?
Well, the call is yours. If however you choose the former, better be prepared for consequences you haven't bargained for.
