Black hat methods Shorter Route to Online Success but Don’t Use Black Hat SEO Techniques for Quick Listing and Ranking in Search Engines.

Higher search engine ranking is not achieved overnight. It takes considerable efforts and time to finally get a website to the top of search engine results. One of the most effective ways to help a website establish successful online presence and ranking is search engine optimisation or SEO.

Just like anything else, there is no shortcut way to online success. Top search engine ranking achieved through acceptable search engine optimisation strategies has long term benefits. Black hat SEO techniques will only give short term results and worst it can get a website banned on the search engines.

Search engine optimisation; however, takes time to achieve results. Some web marketers are not open to the idea of waiting for months to achieve the search engine ranking they are aiming for. This is the reason why some of them decide to take the shorter route to high search engine ranking. They do this by using black hat SEO techniques.

Google poste un profit de 22 milliards de dollars en 2008, basé en grande partie sur son moteur de publicité de liens texte – Adwords. Cette statistique apporte deux infos:

• La publicité de liens textuels sur les moteurs de recherche doit bien marcher… sinon il n’y aurait pas autant de monde!
• Quelle chance pour celui qui est bien référencé dans les pages de résultats de manière “naturelle” c’est à dire sans passer par l’achat de liens texte.

Concentrons nous sur cette deuxième information… et concrètement, la question que tout le monde se pose:

Comment puis-je bien référencer mon site naturellement?

Réponse courte: contactez un référenceur

Réponse longue:

• Assurez vous d’être crawlé par les robots
• Faciliter l’indexation de vos pages par les moteurs
• Optimisez votre site et son contenu pour des mots-clés que vous avez étudiés
• Développer votre “link graph” et l’autorité de votre site

Si vous ne comprenez pas tout ce n’est pas très important (du moins pour le moment). Le plus important c’est le dernier point, et savoir que vous pouvez faire la différence sur Google en obtenant des liens vers votre site. C’est une démarche qu’on appelle le link building, ou net linking.

[NDLR: frappant de voir comment le lien anglais de Wikipedia est plus complet que le lien français]

Les liens sont importants: par la quantité mais également la qualité.
Mais si on ignore la qualité, on peut se demander pourquoi les gens n’achètent pas tout simplement les liens.

J’ai besoin d’un référencement naturel rapidement, je ne peux le faire manuellement, pourquoi je n’achète pas 1500 euros de liens plutôt que de payer Google Adwords

Car Google adwords et la publicité sur moteurs de recherche en général, ce sont des liens textes, mais ces liens n’aident en aucun cas votre référencement naturel car ils ne sont pas “suivis” par les moteurs, ils ne transfèrent pas de valeur.

C’est pourquoi ce sont crées des plateformes d’achats de liens textes qui elles passent du “link juice” vers votre site. C’est à dire que non seulement des visiteurs peuvent accéder à votre site par le biais de ces liens, mais surtout, chacun de ces liens vous aident à construire votre référencement.

Faut il utiliser ses plateformes d’achat de liens texte

J’ai deux “idoles” dans le domaine du référencement naturel, Rand Fishkin de SEOMoz et Aaron Wall de SEOBook. L’un a évoqué brièvement qu’ils ne recommanderait plus les techniques d’achats de liens textes, l’autre rétorquant qu’il fallait tout de même considérer cette tactique, avec ses “pours” et ses “contres”

Le comble, les plateformes d'achat de liens qui font de la promo sur Adwords

Je suis plutôt d’accord avec Aaron, même si je n’ai jamais encore aujourd’hui recommandé l’achat de lien.

Les “pour” de l’achat de lien texte:

• rapide: on peut obtenir un bon référencement rapidement
• facile: il suffit de payer

Les “contre”:

• Google et les autres moteurs font la chasse à ses pratiques: elles sont formellement interdites dans les “guidelines” des moteurs de recherche.
• Ce sont des liens qui sont parfois de mauvaise qualité, donc au final, il est important de passer du temps pour sélectionner le site qui hébergera les liens

Mais la véritable raison pour laquelle je déconseille cette pratique, c’est parce qu’on a toujours du “link building” manuel, de la relation presse, des événements à organiser… tout un tas de techniques qui permettent de rapporter des liens vers son site sans prendre le risque d’être désindexer parce qu’on a acheté des liens, et donc qu’on a enfreint les règles des moteurs.

Avez vous des liens à récupérer facilement? Oui, alors au travail!

Search Engine Optimization or simply known as SEO is one of the many search engine marketing or SEM strategies used by web webmasters to increase the volume of traffic coming in directly from search engines including Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. Although SEO is a growing strategy, contraversies revolving the methods and techniques used in the strategy are growing as well. One of its most recent contraversial strategy is the use of scraper sites. A scraper site is a website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping. Web scraping is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites. Usually, according to SEO Pakistan specialists, such software programs simulate human exploration of the Web by either implementing low-level Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), or embedding certain full-fledged Web browsers, such as the Internet Explorer (IE) and the Mozilla Web browser. No part of a scraper site is original.

A search engine is not a scraper site: sites such as Yahoo and Google gather content from other websites and index it so that the index can be searched with keywords. Search engines then display snippets of the original site content in response to a user’s search. In the last few years, and due to the advent of the Google Adsense web advertising program, scraper sites have proliferated at an amazing rate for spamming search engines. According to SEO Pakistan specialists, open content sites such as Wikipedia are a common source of material for scraper sites. Techniques Many scrapers will pull snippets and text from websites that rank high for keywords they have targeted. This way they hope to rank highly in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). RSS feeds are vulnerable to scrapers. According to SEO Pakistan specialists, scrapers tend to be associated with link farms and are sometimes perceived as the same thing, when multiple scrapers link to the same target site. A frequent target victim site might be accused of link-farm participation, due to the artificial pattern of incoming links to a victim website, linked from multiple scraper sites. Legality Scraper sites may violate copyright law. Even taking content from an open content site can be a copyright violation, if done in a way which does not respect the license. For instance, the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and Creative Commons ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) licenses require that a republisher inform readers of the license conditions, and give credit to the original author.

SEO techniques are divided into two parts, techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve. These techniques are known to many webmasters as the White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing. The one reason why many webmasters still employ Black Hat SEO techniques is because of its quick results compared to White Hat. However, its results may only go as far compared to White Hat SEO which can provide permanent or long-lasting results. Although issues pertaining to the use of Black Hat SEO have been widely diminished by changing a search engine’s algorithm, such as the use of keyword stuffing in Meta Tags or Link Farming, several techniques have been currently used to manipulate the results of search engines. Some of these techniques have not yet been widely used as Black Hat SEO, but many consultants have come to consider these techniques are indeed a violation of search engine guidelines. These Black Hat SEO techniques include:
Scraper Sites Sybil Attack Splogs Page Hijacking Cookie Stuffing Blog Spamming Cloaking Scraper Sites This technique usually involves copying all the content of a website to a scraper site by use of web scrapping, which is a tool used for extracting information from a website. Although it may look like a search engine, usually because search engines does the same method by extracting information from a website and indexing it on their own, search engines are not scraper sites. In the last few years, and due to the advent of the Google Adsense web advertising program, scraper sites have proliferated at an amazing rate for spamming search engines. Open content sites such as Wikipedia are a common source of material for scraper sites. Scraper sites are widely used today as a way to gain profit by use of advertising programs such as Google AdSense. According to different SEO Philippines consultants, these sites are commonly known as Made for AdSense. Made for AdSense sites are considered sites that are spamming search engines and diluting the search results by providing surfers with less-than-satisfactory search results. The scraped content is considered redundant to that which would be shown by the search engine under normal circumstances had no Made for AdSense ebsite been found in the listings. Sybil Attack Named after a book called Sybil, a case study of a woman with multiple personality disorder, Sybil Attack is an attack wherein a reputation system is subverted by forging multiple identities in peer-to-peer networks. A reputation system’s vulnerability to a Sybil attack depends on how cheaply identities can be generated, the degree to which the reputation system accepts inputs from entities that do not have a chain of trust linking them to a trusted entity, and whether the reputation system treats all entities identically. A faulty node or an adversary may present itself with multiple identities in a peer-to-peer network to appear and function as distinct nodes. By becoming part of the peer-to-peer network, the adversary may then overhear communications or act maliciously. By masquerading and presenting multiple identities, the adversary can control the network substantially. Splogs Spam blogs or usually known as Splogs are blogs particularly made for spamming. This is used to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. This in turn will increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites. There is frequent confusion between the terms “splog” and “spam in blogs”. Splogs are blogs where the articles are fake, and are only created for search engine spamming. To spam in blogs, conversely, is to include random comments on the blogs of innocent bystanders, in which spammers take advantage of a site’s ability to allow visitors to post comments that may include links. In fact, one of the earliest uses of the term “splog” referred to the latter. Splogs have become a major problem on free blog hosts such as Google’s Blogger service. By one estimate, about one in five blogs are spam blogs.
According to different SEO Philippines consultants, these fake blogs waste valuable disk space and bandwidth as well as pollute search engine results, ruining blog search engines and damaging bloggers community networking. One particular problem is using popular blog names from other bloggers. Splogs sometimes choose a name similar to a popular blog in order to benefit from the occasional incoming link from careless bloggers, who think they are linking to the popular site. Splog activity can cause problems for legitimate bloggers, if search engines respond to splog by blocking or treating as ’suspicious’ all web addresses in a particular domain. Page Hijacking Page hijacking is a form of search engine index spamming. It is achieved by creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites. Spammers can use this technique to achieve high rankings in result pages for certain key words. Page hijacking is a form of cloaking, made possible because some web crawlers detect duplicates while indexing web pages. If two pages have the same content, only one of the URLs will be kept. A spammer will try to ensure that the rogue website is the one shown on the result pages. Cookie Stuffing Cookie stuffing can sometimes be a blackhat online marketing technique used to generate fraudulent affiliate sales. It involves placing an affiliate tracking cookie on a website visitor’s computer without their knowledge, which will then generate revenue for the person doing the cookie stuffing. Income is generated when the affected user visits the target affiliate site and either creates an account or makes a purchase, depending on the terms of the affiliate agreement. Operators of websites that allow user-generated content, such as forums that allow users to post, should be aware of this technique in order to protect their visitors from this attack. Cookie stuffing can be accomplished with as little as including an image in a forum post.
Blog Spamming One of the most widely used form of Black Hat SEO today, blog spamming. This is usually done with the use of a software that automatically generates random comments to blogs. According to different SEO Philippines consultants, any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target. Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers. Cloaking Cloaking refers to any of several means to serve a page to the search-engine spider that is different from that seen by human users. It can be an attempt to mislead search engines regarding the content on a particular web site. Cloaking, however, can also be used to ethically increase accessibility of a site to users with disabilities or provide human users with content that search engines aren’t able to process or parse.

When it comes to white hat and black hat SEO, the name says it all! White hat SEO obviously complies with the set rules of promoting websites as dictated by the search engines. Whereas, black hat SEO is the process of exploiting and manipulating certain possibilities that are viewed seriously by the search engines. In fact, the very name SEO is considered devilish by many website owners! They argue that any attempt to manipulate the contents of a website to influence ranking is unfair and feel neither white hat nor black hat SEO is ethically good.

Even the allowed techniques of optimizing web pages to rank high in search engines evoke a mixed response from the website owners and webmasters. However, search engines are designed to work in that pattern so it leaves you with no other choice but to optimize your website for search engines. Interestingly the irony is all those who still argue against SEO have themselves optimized their own websites for search engines!

Most of the techniques in white hat SEO are also followed in black hat SEO but with subtle changes that are not legal as far as search engines are concerned. A few examples of black hat SEO techniques will enlighten you on the various tricks involved in black hat SEO. For instance, optimizing web pages with relevant keywords is purely a white hat SEO technique. On the contrary black hat optimization would use the same technique but in a different manner, i.e., by keyword stuffing, invisible text, and doorway pages. This certainly can fool the search engines but not every time. With machines getting smarter by the day search engines can detect such techniques. If your website had followed any of the black hat SEO techniques, it can be penalized or even banned by the search engines.

It is always wise to comply with the set rules while optimizing your website for search engines. If you are not confident about the techniques, you have at hand, do get assistance from professionals that can help you achieve your desired goals.

I’ve now been privileged to receive my first two Spanish spam comments, after posting about Barcelona so much recently! Multilingual spam – cool.

On a serious note though, I’d personally recommend that everyone moderates all their comments on blogs because spamming via comments is a popular pastime. Why? Because the spammer gets a link to their site at the same time, and the more links from outside sites to a website, the higher it’s ranked on Googe and other search engines. It’s known as black hat SEO and it’s not funny and it’s not clever.

Some spam is more targetted – for instance a certain mattress is being subtly and perhaps unethically advertised on various R.A. blogs at the moment. Odd that I had an identical comment saying how great the mattress was to one on one of the blogs I follow, and yet purporting to be a different person posting. These guys are taking it to a new level though. Instead of posting a general comment like ‘great blog man. Cool info! So glad I found it’ which can apply to any blog in the known universe, the mattress folk are responding to actual blog posts – must be time consuming but probably pays better dividends as they look like ‘real posts from real people’.

Interestingly I recent saw some information that suggested this was now illegal in America – you have to actually state a material link to the thing being advertised, if one exists. It may simply be that you were sent a free one to review – you still have to make it clear that you received it for free.

So … watch out mattress folk – gut subtler, get out or get your fingers burned.

On the bright side – I kinda get a kick out of spotting them and going ha ha, didn’t fool me … this time!

Interesting read today from Fox news on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).  This is something that would effect SEO companies as they are prone to adding links and building blogs to get more traffic.  The FTC has voted to regulate blogging and fine those that are posting product reviews for money.  They believe that these reviews are misleading in that the consumer is unaware if the review is a organic unsolicited review or if the review is paid for by the product company.  Further, many of these sites and reviews sign on as affiliates and receive a commission if the product is bought through their site.

The law will require that bloggers must make it known that they are being paid in a “clear and conspicuous” manner and the law goes into force December 1st, 2009. The law does not require notification for “free” products, meaning if I were to offer you free pest control service in exchange for a review then you are not required to disclose that you are receiving free service. While these regulations may make many bloggers nervous, the FTC says that they intend to target the companies and advertisers.  This actually makes me more nervous as a pest control company.

Let’s say that I am paying an SEO company to build my site and back links.  How can I be sure that the SEO company I hire is adhering to this law?  Who then is responsible, the SEO company or the pest control company?  Further, this law seems very inadequate.  How do you define a “review” of a company or a review of a product?  How will the FTC distinguish between legitimate customers reviewing a product or service versus the paid reviews? And what about blogs that benefit indirectly from their reviews (i.e. Google adsense)?

Or better yet define “clear and conspicuous”. How do I know if this site “clearly and conspicuously” show that I am a Bulwark employee.  Is the facebook profile on the left sufficient or do I need to disclose this in every post?  Beyond that this blog isn’t purely a Bulwark blog, its my own blog and thoughts as well.  Bulwark does not sanction everything written on this blog and I am not really getting paid directly for my content.

Overall, however, I applaud the FTC’s attempt to regulate this gross flood of solicited reviews. It is unfortunate that so many companies and individuals are cashing in on the naive public.  Having worked on the internet for sometime I  spot the propaganda reviews and comments regularly. In fact, there are entire blogs that look like just a single user reviewing everyday products, but in fact are a paid blogger.

As far as I am aware Bulwark has not overstepped these requirements.  But, again, I am unaware of every attempt hired SEO firms have undergone to boost my web presence. Further, I don’t know how they define “clear and conspicuous”.  Hopefully a site that is owned by Bulwark is clear. But, it does sound  like I will need to check in on my SEO team, and I would advise all internet advertisers and business owners to do the same. Don’t get caught with your pants down.

From your Pest Control SEO guy.

This post was not directly paid for by Bulwark Exterminating, however the writter is biased as to which pest control service is the best.

En los proyectos finales de carrera se aprenden muchas cosas, tanto desde el punto de vista teórico como desde el punto de vista práctico. Ya que el mío, que estaba orientado a SEO, era más teórico que práctico, he aprendido bastante sobre cómo funcionan los mecanismos de marketing de las empresas que están en la Red y una de ellas es el conjunto de técnicas que no se emplean en la optimización para motores de búsqueda.

Ese conjunto de técnicas ilegítimas se conoce como Black Hat SEO. Los motores de búsqueda cambian cada cierto tiempo sus definiciones sobre qué constituye spam de SEO o qué técnicas llevan a una ventaja injusta, aunque dichas ventajas, al final, resultan más bien inconvenientes para los “sitios tramposos”.

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Técnicas de Black Hat SEO habituales

Existen muchas técnicas de Black Hat SEO y aquí voy a destacar unas cuantas:

• Texto oculto. Ésta es una de las prácticas más habituales. Se hace que el texto tenga el mismo color que el fondo, por lo que los usuarios, a menos que los seleccionen y arrastren con el ratón, no lo verán, pero este texto sí está disponible, por decirlo de alguna manera, para los buscadores y detectar las palabras clave en estos textos ocultos.
• Estrategias de enlaces. En este caso hay muchas variantes: enlaces transparentes (usando el mismo método que el texto oculto, aunque lo que hacen es que el buscador vaya a los enlaces), ocultos, (detrás de gráficos, sin convertirlos en un enlace), de despiste (llevan a otro sitio, distinto al esperado), etc.
  • También están las temidas granjas de enlaces, páginas creadas simplemente para amontonar enlaces sin ton ni son con tal de aumentar la clasificación del sitio.
  • Otro aspecto a cuidar es el intercambio de enlaces, ya que, aun siendo una práctica positiva si los sitios son relevantes, hay personas que toman ventaja de ello e intercambian enlaces con cualquiera o incluso crear otras páginas web para obtener un cruce de enlaces y beneficiarse de los “votos” para el PageRank.
• Abuso de palabras clave. Las palabras clave definen el sitio web y deben aparecer en la justa medida y tener relevancia. Si no, incurriremos en una sobrecarga artificial de palabras clave, repitiéndolas varias veces en el sitio web. Esto puede ayudar al principio, pero el buscador puede detectar este abuso, acabando con una penalización para la página web.
• Páginas de puerta trasera. Se suelen confundir con páginas “de aterrizaje” (aquellas a las que van a parar los visitantes al pulsar sobre un anuncio), pero las páginas puerta son creadas para que los buscadores las pongan en posiciones altas. Suelen usar algún tipo de redirección para que al pulsar en el enlace en un buscador, el usuario sea llevado a otra página.
• Contenido duplicado. En ocasiones, se recurre al uso de contenido ya existente a la hora de crear el propio, haga falta o no el permiso del autor original. Los buscadores son capaces de detectar la novedad de un contenido o si éste se repite con respecto a otras páginas. La información duplicada puede dividirse en varios tipos:
  • Reimpresiones.
  • Descripciones de productos de tiendas en línea.
  • Site Mirroring (usado sobre todo para tener sitios de emergencia por si uno se cae).
  • Robo de contenido.
  • Duplicación de contenido dentro del propio sitio.
• Copia de página. Muy parecido a la copia de contenido, pero en este caso se copia toda la página para incrementar la clasificación y el tráfico de otro sitio, usando esta página copiada como tapadera para redireccionar a los usuarios a otro sitio web.
• Cebo y cambio (Atraer y cambiar). Permite crear una página web optimizada para buscadores con la intención de obtener mejores clasificación. Una vez obtenidos, la compañía sustituye el sitio optimizado por uno menos optimizado y más normal. Es decir, después del cambio aún tendrá abundante tráfico. Los buscadores, sin embargo, pueden detectar estas prácticas y reajustar su clasificación al verdadero contenido de estas páginas.
• Encapotamiento (Cloaking). Se muestra una página basada en quién la ha pedido, por lo que un usuario verá un tipo de página, pero los buscadores verán una página más relevante y mejor optimizada, pero aun así pueden detectar esta técnica. Algunas personas usan encapotamiento para proteger su código fuente, ya que en los navegadores se puede mostrar dicho código. Sin embargo, esta táctica para proteger el código fuente no es recomendable debido a que el encapotamiento en general es penalizado por los motores de búsqueda.
• Manipulación de PageRank. Muchos llevan a cabo esta práctica debido a la importancia comercial que tiene aparecer entre los primeros resultados del buscador. Para ello, se empleará spam de diversa índole con la intención de incrementar el número de enlaces que apuntan a la página.
• Páginas generadas por máquina. Utilizan un programa para generarlas, normalmente tomando contenido de otros sitios. También destacan aquí los blogs de spam, que emplean servicios de creación gratuita de blogs para crear
  bitácoras donde cada entrada no es más que una recolección de enlaces y anuncios.

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¿Cómo evitarlo?

No siempre es fácil ver qué técnicas pueden realmente desembocar en Black Hat SEO, puesto que algunas pueden parecer de lo más legítimas o rozarlo un poco. Pero es cierto que otras incluso suponen una vulneración de derechos de autor y llevar incluso a acciones legales contra los practicantes de estas técnicas ilegítimas.

Sólo hay que seguir unas pequeñas guías para no caer en estas técnicas:

1. Evitar hacer algo de lo que uno pueda arrepentirse.
2. Evitar que la página parezca lo que no es.
3. No confiar en alguien que considera cierta práctica como aceptable si ésta parece sospechosa.
4. Crear el sitio web orientado a los usuarios, no a los buscadores, ya que son los primeros nuestro público objetivo. Por ello hay que ofrecer contenido único, útil y relevante y respetar al usuario.
5. Usar los enlaces de forma adecuada, buscando el equilibrio entre enlaces internos y externos.
6. Evitar obsesionarse con resultados y clasificaciones.

What is all about:

Black Hat SEO is customarily circumscribed as wrong behavior techniques that are consumed to intend higher search engine rankings. These black hat SEO techniques commonly allow one or more of the mass characteristics:

* they breaks search engine rules and regulations
* creates a slummy individual undergo direct because of the black hat SEO techniques consumed on the Web site
* unethically presents material in a assorted seeable or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

A aggregation of what is famous as black hat SEO actually consumed to be legit, but some folks went a bit overboard and today these techniques are frowned upon by the generalized SEO accord at large. These black hat SEO practices will actually wage short-term gains in cost of rankings, but if you are unconcealed utilizing these spammy techniques on your Web site, you separate the venture of existence punished by search engines. Negroid headgear SEO essentially is a short-sighted resolution to a long-term problem, which is creating a Web place that provides both a enthusiastic individual undergo and every that goes with that.

SEO is one of the marketing strategies used for increasing site visibility in search engines. Different people follow different SEO techniques for organic promotion in search engines; some may be ethical, some non-ethical and others intermediate. These practices are colored according to techniques used, compared with the search engines recommendations and guidelines.

Here is the list of SEO colors and definitions determined by various SEO communities.

White Hat SEO- Called as ethical SEO, it follows search engines™ guidelines. In this a content page that the search engine indexes and subsequently ranks, would contain the same content that a visitor would see. White hat advice is explained as a procedure of creating content for users, not for search engines, thereby making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than finding out a method to trick the algorithm from its designated intention.

Black Hat SEO – known as Un-ethical SEO, is a procedure that tries to achieve high rankings in short time by using various SEO techniques that don’t follow search engine guidelines, or treated as means of deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another black hat method is creating different pages for the search engines and the users, depending upon who is accessing the website. This method is referred to as cloaking.

Gray Hat SEO – These are SEO tactics that cannot be termed either as ethical or unethical, but can be termed as something in between the two. It is unlikely that a site gets banned or can have negative affects on it, due to following Gray Hat SEO tactics.

Green Hat SEO – It is just a matter of putting all unnecessary procedures and SEO actions to an end and focusing on what all is essential to get in website visitors. When focus is given more on the importance and prominence to the people who visit your website, your site will create more brand awareness, thereby becoming more trustworthy, rather than targeting keywords that provide more traffic, even though it means that you do not have any relevant pages suitable for them. It is to be understood that a happy customer is someone who is more important to your business to get in more profit to you, rather than getting more of inward links.

Blue Hat SEO – Some say its related to advanced SEO techniques used for web promotion but the same has not yet been declared by any top SEO communities or SEO groups. Originally Blue Hat SEO is a name of a weblog so many misunderstand.

And please do note that these SEO colors are not standard ones, they are marketing types distinguished between SEOs who adopt their SEO techniques from ethical to unethical or a mix of both. Probably in the near future we might even come up with more colors of SEO as seen in rainbow!!!

I want to personally thank Tom Pick of WebMarketCentral for his tips on selecting an SEO consultant. His post dredged up some bad memories and very good lessons learned from my own experience.

(Stick with this post and you’ll find additional nuggets of SEO wisdom you can pull out when you need them)

A couple of years ago - late summer of 2007 - we launched our first-ever SEO initiative. We did it to support a brand-spanking-new website that was to be launched on January 1, 2008. We were bound and determined to do it – design, content, meta data, etc. – right from the beginning and knew just enough to get us in trouble, so we decided to engage the services of an SEO vendor. After a few weeks of researching best practices, we identified three potential vendors and started the evaluation process. 

I haven’t polled the team, but I’m willing to bet there is a consensus that we made a poor decision. I know we did our due diligence and asked all the right questions, but the project still crashed. A lot of time was spent discussing tactics – white hat v. black hat – and we were convinced the chosen vendor used white hat SEO practices. In the end, what was positioned as white was turned a dingey gray through the combination of two key pieces to any SEO initiative: content and keywords.

The vendor’s proposal called for a list of 50 keywords from which they would develop content that would link to appropriate pages of our website. The vendor developed pages were positioned as a deeper layer of content that, through intra-linking, would increase organic search rankings. Makes sense. The more links to relevant content the better.

Red Flag no. 1:The first sign of trouble came when we saw the questionnaire that was to drive the development of the keywords. From the first question to the last two things were painfully clear. First, the vendor’s key market is small retailers. Second, their practice is structured around companies that have little if any website experience – design, content, etc. I must admit I cringed a bit when I submitted the answers, knowing they would be used to develop the 50 keywords. My cringe was vindicated a few days later.

Ref Flag no. 2: The keywords returned were, in a word, worthless. I’m being a bit extreme, but the truth is most of what the vendor delivered was meaningless. There were a few semi-useful keywords, but most had no basis in the reality of the industry I serve – manufacturing. Disappointed, but not completely disillusioned, I contacted the project manager only to find out they were not really a project manager at all. Worse yet, I found there was no project manager assigned.

Red Flag no. 3: Worser yet, the vendor does not assign project managers. Instead, there is a different body for each step of the process – keywords, content creation, link building, and so on. Worser worser yet, no one body knew how to communicate with other bodies assigned to the case – if communication was allowed. They lived in the ultimate Silo Land. I insisted on and got a point person assigned for the balance of the project.

Red Flag no. 4: In the end, I created all the keywords the vendor would use to create the content they promised. I even provided rules for how keywords could and could not be used. (For example, it makes no sense to discuss process manufacturing and medical devices on the same page). What I got back page after page of gibberish. Unusable garbage that wasn’t fit to line a digital birdcage. I called the “project manager” and expressed, in no uncertain terms, my utter disappointment with the content. The reply I got sent me over the edge. I was told that it didn’t matter that the content made no sense, only that the keywords were represented and ultimately linked to the appropriate pages of the website. That is the point at which everything became crystal clear - or dingey gray – to me.

The vendor had no intention of providing content that would actually add value to visitors to the website. With this revelation in hand, I asked about the possibility of one of these pages showing up in a search and someone, a potential prospect or current customer, seeing the nonsense we were publishing. The “project manager” assured me the chances of that happening were infinitesimally small. Furthermore, if one of the pages did pop up, the reader would likely navigate to the page, click on one of the keywords and follow that link to a page – one that I wrote – that contained the information they wanted.

Lovely. Just lovely.

In the final analysis we paid for the priviledge writing our own keywords that were ultimatley used to create worthless content that was just this side of being black hat SEO. The content as provided by the vendor still sits in a file. It is unused and will remain ever so.

Here are a few of the lessons I learned from the process:

1. Ask potential vendors what their customer base looks like. If it doesn’t look like you, say good bye.
2. When vendors talk about generating content, have them clarify exactly what that means. If their content isn’t fit for public consumption, if it’s something you wouldn’t show your mother, say good bye.
3. Ask about the team that will be assigned to the project and who the project manager is. If they tell you the team is TBD, say good bye.

I purposely did not mention the name of the vendor, although I know at least one person reading this post knows the answer, but it is a well known name in the industry. They would do well to be honest about their core market and their SEO tactics because if someone does ask, I’ll recommend they steer clear of this one.

So how does White Hat compare vs. Black Hat for marketers and web site operators? Black Hat SEO techniques can often be faster and easier to implement. However, they run the risk of causing search engines to downgrade or remove a site from results. They tend to be ineffective in the long-term; search engines usually catch on to each Black Hat technique after it is introduced, often penalizing sites which have used it.

Black hat is a common term known to search engine optimisers, it is considered as wrong techniques used to get websites increased exposure in search engines. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN wants to ensure they are display relevant results to their end users. For those who state flourishing “Black hat” or “Unethical” techniques to get their sites to show up in the search results pages, more often than not, will not give you the information you were looking for. For example, if a Webmaster wants to make money with Google Adsense, they place content on a webpage in the hope that when someone finds that page, they module utter on an Ad because the content on the page is not useful. In return, the Webmaster gets paid for that click. The result is poor user experience because of the black hat SEO techniques used by the Webmaster to fool the search engines into believing the page was relevant to the search. This is just what search engines are trying to combat. If you are a person who is hoping to outsource search engine marketing, then it is important you know what to look out for and avoid when trusting someone with your website.

White Hat SEO is optimizing your web pages in an ethical way so that they rank better in the search engines.

Black Hat SEO is using tricky and unethical practices to try and get higher rankings.

The search engine understandably doesn’t like Black Hat techniques. You may wonder what these comprise of.

Here are some Black Hat techniques that you should avoid if you value your rankings:

Cloaking: This is a technique that displays different content to the search engine and the visitors. This way they can add many keywords to what the search engines see. This may be unreadable to humans. Then the humans are fed another page design for them.

Duplicate Content: Some sites will use duplicated content which is frankly spammed. This could be duplicate content on the same site or content that was copied from another site. If you abuse this technique than you could be banned from some search engines.

Irrelevant keywords: in the meta tags If you add keywords in the Meta tags that aren’t actually on the web page, then this is considered spamming. If you want your rankings lowered then that’s the way to do it.

Linking to Bad Neighborhoods: Make sure you only link to Good Neighborhoods. Don’t link to sites that spam or use any type of Black Hat SEO. That will surely backfire on you.

Hidden Text: If you try to add hidden text by making the text color the same as, or close to the background, then that’s Black Hat SEO and you could very easily be removed from the search engines. This also goes for very tiny text. If your visitors can’t read it easily, then it better not be there!

More than one Title: Just like keyword stuffing, don’t do it. You should only have one title tag per page. Be careful, sometimes you can do this accidentally. Double check to make sure there’s only one title tag.

Sometimes Black Hat can deliver fast results, but they don’t last long. Eventually your rankings will drop way down or you could be banned from the search engines.

]]> http://mediaprecision.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/black-hat-vs-white-hat-are-the-risks-worth-the-rewards/ Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:14:45 +0000 mediaprecision http://mediaprecision.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/black-hat-vs-white-hat-are-the-risks-worth-the-rewards/

White hat and black hat techniques are commonplace in internet marketing. However, a lot of us are not familiar with what they are. White hat marketing is when a marketer or webmaster uses techniques that are ethical such as SEO. Black hat marketing is when a marketer or webmaster uses techniques that are unethical such as keyword stuffing. Black hat techniques are considered deceptive practices.

When a marketer or webmaster uses internal links instead of pictures or logo’s is a white hat marketing practice. When search engines can identify the sites internal links they realize that site is legitimate. However if the site uses a lot of logos and pictures with internal link in them is a black hat practice because search engines cannot identify logos and pictures as internal links therefore this is a deceptive practice.

When a website has content that is easy to read and offers useful information to visitors this is a white hat practice. Content that is hard to read and contains keywords or keyword phrases used repeatedly is a black hat practice. This is known as keyword stuffing and usually results in that website being blacklisted.

All websites should be optimised to make a good appearance creating the potential for more visitors. All pages including sub pages should be optimized with the same keywords, Meta tags, content, titles and links. This is a white hat technique. A black hat seo technique would be if the site has random information on all pages.

A website that has eye appeal with font colours complimenting the background is a white hat technique. Websites that have most of the information the same font colour as the background is a black hat technique. This is easy to catch by search engines and blacklist that website.

When you come across a website where the text is the exact same colour as the background that site owner is a black hat marketer. This deceptive practice is intended to confuse visitors however competitors as well as search bots recognize this trick and chances are these types of websites are blacklisted. This is not a smart black hat practice since it is easily recognized.

A black hat technique called cloaking is when all black hat marketing techniques are used  at one time to submit information to search engines which visitors do not see. Competitors catch this technique as well as search engines. The result for this one is the website being banned by all search engines.

Article by Ian Pearce. Ian is the SEO Copywriter for Media Precision SEO Services Nottingham. Media Precision are Independent SEO consultants specializing in bespoke online marketing packages. For more Articles by Ian, including Ten Steps of SEO, please visit www.mediaprecision.co.uk/news

Avoid the following things which can get you in trouble with
search engines:

-Don’t use hidden text or hidden links.
-Don’t employ cloaking or lightning fast java redirects.
-Don’t load up your pages with irrelevant words.
-Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains
with substantially duplicate content.

Are you ready for some more rather advanced stuff? Hang on.

Avoid the following things which can get you in trouble with
search engines:

-Don’t use hidden text or hidden links.
-Don’t employ cloaking or lightning fast java redirects.
-Don’t load up your pages with irrelevant words.
-Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains
with substantially duplicate content.

Are you ready for some more rather advanced stuff? Hang on.

In recent years the concept of SEO has gained a lot of importance. The terms White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO have emerged universally as a marketing strategy to increase a website’s relevancy and ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The SEO industry uses various techniques which can be ethical or unethical depending on the approach SEO professionals wish to adopt for optimizing pages.

White Hat SEO uses strategies which are considered ethically correct and legitimate by SEO’s as well as search engines while spidering a site. It would be best to use this tactic as a means of achieving top ranking in the search results and also boosting real time traffic to your website. These tactics will not lead to penalties which are generally imposed when Black Hat SEO is used and even though it may take some amount of time to reap the rewards of the White Hat SEO process, it will surely bring in promising results in terms of high rakings and also rank stability.

The whole idea behind White Hat SEO is to ensure that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. The content that you would find on the webpage would not be solely for the search engine but also keeping the visitor in mind.

White Hat SEO Tactics:

Internal Linking
A simple way to hinder a good website ranking on the search engine is by making it tough for the search engines to spider and index pages. Several websites may use scripts to provide fancy drop down navigation and so on but unfortunately these scripts will not be crawled and indexed by the search engine bots. They will go unnoticed by the search engine spiders since they are mainly text driven and are oblivious to images, scripts, frames, directories, etc.

Creating a site with scripts and fancy navigations may enhance the look of your website; however, it will prevent the spidering of your site. Therefore, it is essential to add text links at the bottom of your landing page linking to your most important internal pages including the sitemap.

Reciprocal Linking
Building reciprocal links is another White Hat SEO technique where you exchange links with other sites to get additional incoming links to your website. However, you must remember the following points when linking to other sites:

Link to sites that are relevant to yours Consider linking to sites which have content that will appeal to and interest your visitors Link to sites that have keywords you wish to target

Since this process is tedious and time consuming, avoid randomly linking to any site that you come across. This will not only lead to wastage of time and effort but also not bring in any results in terms of achieving a high search engine ranking.

Creating Content
This is an important part of the SEO process where compelling text has to be created that will attract more visitors to your site and add more value to your web pages. Creating a content rich website will not only boost visitor traffic to your site but will also lead to better recognition and indexing of your pages. Also, there would be many webmasters out there who would want to link to your site if they find it to be a good resource on their subject. Though content creation may take a lot of time, it will be worth the time and effort in the future.

Optimizing Your Website
This is another White Hat SEO technique which has gained a lot of popularity in recent times. Optimizing your site to improve its layout, structure, presentation, and content can help you gain better visibility and exposure.

SEO spamming

In simple words Spam is the internet version for pursuing an internet user to call for a lunch and it will end up with yes. It will start with a fascinating push up for you and end up by annoying you. The only purpose the spam is done to make money for the spammers and they keep with it as they work on the law of averages to work with mass as some will respond some day.
Spamming for SEO is filling the indexes with little or no user valuing information for them. In SEO these spamming techniques are termed as black hat SEO that is strictly prohibited by the search engines but some of them fall into the gray area search engine penalizes your ranking if the spiders indexes as a spam for the SERP’s. To regulate this spam’s the search engines regularly updates there definition of the spam that could lead to surprising changes of your page on the SERP’s.

WHAT IS INCLUDED IN THE SEO SPAMMING???

It’s very difficult to track down the specific things that could be considered as spam as I told you before the search engines changes their spamming definitions regularly to go foot to foot with the Black Hat SEO spammers. To be on the safer side we should be doing our SEO according to the Search engine’s guidelines to not to worry about being called as spam.
- Don’t do anything that makes you worry that you’re doing wrong. It sounds like
simple advice, but when you think about it, if you’re doing something on your web
site that you have to worry is going to get you banned from a search engine, you probably
shouldn’t do it.

- Don’t Exaggerate or pretend on your website that you are not.

- Don’t believe in all SEO experts. As some of the SEO experts will use the black hat techniques to go on the indexes but that will be for short term and may lead bad for your website in future.

Spamindexing is the term given to the spamming of index pages it could be of any shape and size, what I told you before was the spamming techniques that were obviously spam but some techniques are there that are clearly spam this list is huge, but dozens of them are constant they are:-

. Transparent links
. Hidden Links
. Misleading links
. Links in Punctuation
. Keyword stuffing
. Doorway pages
. Scraper sites
. Machine generated pages
. Links in punctuations
. Inconspicuous links
. Cloaking
. Excessive cross linking
. Hidden text
. Link only pages
. duplicate content
. Redirect pages
. Sybil attacks
. Wiki spam

this list goes a long….
Spamindexing is the bad idea as this annoy the users as they don’t give the quality information and misleads the users of the indexed page and this could also lead to the negativity for the Search engine that’s why search engine call it as spam and penalize the website by the decrease in their ranking or also by banning the website from the search engine.

Atlast message for spammers- Spaming may generate the lot of revenue for you, but it hasen’t paid to the seatle’s Robert Soloway who’s has been considered as the eighth largest spammer in the world by the spamhaus, So chill.