Black Hat SEO

[Will.Spencer]

I wrote this up today, and I was wondering if I could get some constructive criticism on it?

What is black hat SEO?

Within the SEO comunity, some optimization tactics are considered Black Hat SEO. These are tactics which are not considered to be good or fair by search engine operators, search engine optimizers, or web site visitors.

There is no generally accepted definition for black hat SEO. What may be considered appropriate by one webmaster may not be considered approriate by another webmaster. In addition to personal differences, guidelines for appropriate conduct vary across web site categories. What might be considered acceptable for a web site in the gambling industry may not be equally acceptable for a health care web site.

Here are several guidelines for determining if a technique should be considered Black Hat SEO.

Search Engine Operator Policies

Many search engine operators, such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo, publish policies and guidelines which document what they feel are appropriate and inappropriate SEO techniques.

One school of thought believes that if you stay within these guidelines, you are not practicing black hat SEO.

One difficulty with this model is that the search engine operator guidelines tend to be extremely vague and non-technical. Another difficulty is that the guidelines differ between search engines. For example, Google prefers 301 redirects, while Yahoo prefers doorway pages which inform the user of the new URL.

The Property Rights Approach

The property rights approach to the question of black hat SEO believes that anything you do with your own property is acceptable, but that you should leave other peoples property alone.

By this standard, most on-page SEO techniques are acceptable, but off-page SEO techniques like guestbook spamming should be considered black hat SEO.

This is probably the most reasonable and fair guideline for determining acceptable SEO practices, but it does have some limitations. It does not, for example, address keyword spamming or cloaking.

The Visitor Value Approach

This school of thought believes that SEO techniques which do not add value to the visitors experience belong to the school of black hat SEO.

This approach labels on-page techniques such as hidden text, micro-text, and ALT text spamming as black hat SEO.

The visitor value approach has benefits not only in defining black hat SEO, but also in promoting general practices for good web site design. Black hat SEO practices which violate this guideline may result in a boost to your SERPs, but they will not lead to return visitors or natural incoming links.

The Unnatural Rankings Approach

This school of thought believes that anything which causes a web page to rank unnaturally highly for it's keywords is black hat SEO.

Unfortunately, there is no generally accepted definition for "unnaturally highly"!

If followed to it's logical conclusion, this school of though considers all SEO to be black hat SEO.

Under this approach, even the use of proper heading tags (H1, H2, H3) can be considered black hat SEO.

[buddhu]

Looks good.

Personally I think readers at the level who would find this most helpful might benefit from a little expansion. For example, those who have not yet absorbed a basic grasp of the concept of black hat SEO may also be unfamiliar with concepts such as alt spamming. May I suggest either a little brief explanation of things like this, or perhaps links to threads that cover them?

I understand that you're just trying to summarise the different schools of thought, but you've started something interesting here, and I'd like to see you go into a little more depth with it.

The Unnatural Rankings Approach bit might scare newbies into thinking it's actually easier than it is to get banned for accidental SE spamming. Perhaps a little more analysis here, and maybe a bit of reassurance for the ultra-timid webmaster/SEO?

One last, inexcusably pedantic thing... the possessive "its" doesn't need an apostrophe.

Please feel free to retaliate with criticism of my own, decidedly freestyle, approach to spelling, grammar and punctuation ;)

[Will.Spencer]

Ah yes, the HTML version has some links to explanatory pages, and will have more over the next few weeks. Content is king!

d'oh. I'm alway's doing that thing with apostrophe's. ;-)

Hmmmm... assurance for the timid that won't encourage them to get into trouble... I'll work that in.

Thanks for the notes! :)