Black Hat or White Hat?

Ethical SEO tactics are more straightforward than you might think. But a solid understanding of guidelines will help you stay on the straight-and-narrow.

By Vanessa Fox
Wednesday, December 3, 2008

The practice of search engine optimization (SEO) is ensuring that a Web site is designed so that it can be well-indexed by search engines and ranks highly in search results for relevant queries.

It is in the search engines’ best interest for sites to be optimized for search. After all, their charter is to return the very best results possible for each query. If the engines’ crawlers can’t access the best content because of technical issues with a site, then the search engines, the searcher, and the site owner are all underserved.

However, some techniques go beyond optimizing and attempt to manipulate results. While optimization techniques improve search results by making relevant content available, manipulation techniques hurt results because they can make irrelevant, low-quality content rank more highly than high-quality, useful content.

It’s All Black and White

When search engines discover this behavior, they may take action against the sites engaging in it by either demoting or removing the site from results. Each engine has a published set of guidelines and sites that don’t adhere to those guidelines risk being removed.

In the SEO industry, the common slang for SEO practices that adhere (or not) to the guidelines are “white hat” and “black hat.” Practices that seem to fall in the middle are called gray. There’s often debate about what tactics are black hat, and those who don’t spend every day thinking about SEO can get overwhelmed with figuring out what’s risk-free.

SEO may seem complicated, but the line between black and white is actually quite straightforward. Techniques that violate the guidelines may be effective (at least for a time), commonplace, non-deceptive, or justified, but they’re not white hat. Any violation of the guidelines is black hat activity and puts the site at risk of being removed from the search engines’ indices. That’s pretty black and white.

Here is a rundown of some common violations and how to avoid them.

Cloaking

This is the practice of showing different content to users than to search engines. Search engines want to present searchers with an accurate view of the sites they are listing so they don’t want to see something different than the searcher will see. Sites sometimes cloak for deceptive reasons (for instance, they show the search engines a page that repeats a particular word a number of times in hopes that this will help the page rank more highly for that word) and sometimes for innocent reasons (they show search engines an HTML version of a Flash page, since search engines can’t easily extract content from Flash files). Regardless of intent, presenting different content to search engines than you display to users is against the search engine guidelines.

Link Schemes, Link Exchanges, and Paid Links

These are techniques to artificially build links to a Web site. Search engines use links to a page to help determine what pages are most relevant and authoritative for a query. Pages with a lot of links are likely more useful than pages without them. However, search engines only want to count links that are editorially given. Some site owners hear that a site with a lot of links has a better chance of ranking well and get involved with programs that pay other sites to place links to your site in exchange for you linking to other sites, or use “link farms.” Any linking activity that is done for the sake of influencing search engine rankings is against the guidelines.

Keyword Stuffing and Hidden Text

These are methods to include keywords that are intended for search engines and not for visitors on a site. Sometimes this text is invisible to visitors (for instance white text on a white background) and other times it’s simply in tiny font in the footer. Ensure that all content on your pages is intended for the visitors of your site.

Scraping and Autogenerating Content

This is generally done to create many content-filled pages quickly. Sites that use these methods copy content from other sites or create jibberish content. The intent of these sites is generally to get visitors to click on the ads.

The search engines’ guidelines are built on a core guiding principle—create unique, high-quality content that meets searchers’ needs. Rather than try to get a site to rank highly via deceptive practices, invest in making the site the best possible result for relevant queries. That’s a long-term investment in your business that keeps search engines, searchers and your company happy.

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You can find a similar version of this column—and other SEO topics—on Vanessa Fox’s blog. She is the creator of Google’s Webmaster Central. She is also the founder of Nine By Blue, and now works for Ignition Partners as an “entrepreneur in residence.”