Search Engine Web Promotion

You’re kidding me, right? If anyone really stopped and thought about it, they would see that white hats, gray hats, and black hats aren’t separated by clear lines. It’s not a matter of grouping, as in you have your white hats over here, your black hats over there and never shall they meet.

The reality of the matter is that Search Engine Optimization works on a spectrum of aggressiveness. The more passive you are in your SEO, the whiter your hat is. The more aggressive you are, the blacker your hat is. There is no Sword of Judgment that clearly marks one from the other. Let’s start on the light end of the scale.

There is a collection of techniques that everyone uses that are called white hat. It’s your basic level SEO, where you optimize your page and hope that people will give you links, at least on that far end of the spectrum. No matter what color your hat supposedly is, you use this stuff because it’s the basic level of getting ranking.

Here, it’s almost all about in page Search Engine Optimization, but with certain restrictions. You don’t stuff the page with keywords, but you otherwise do what you can for search engine ranking. You cross your fingers and hope that some webmaster with authority will give a link to your website. It’s kind of sad, really.

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As we move across the spectrum toward the dark side, we first encounter techniques that the absolute pansies of Search Engine Optimization find questionable. They’re nothing that Google will smack you for, but you might get some raised eyebrows from the prudish marketers. There will also be marketers that technically qualify as white hat that dabble in these practices.

Things like backlinking from Web 2.0 properties fit in here. So many people do this sort of thing anymore that it’s starting to be accepted as legitimate practice. However, there are also whispers circulating that this kind of marketing technique will be moved over to the black hat end of things as soon as Google gets a wild hair about it.

Now we get into black hat territory. This is the realm of the more aggressive marketing techniques. Still yet, there will be some so-called white hats that will secretly use some of these techniques, at least the stuff that’s on the cusp of gray hat.

Here we have page scraping, doorway pages, keyword stuffing and other techniques designed to trick the search engines into giving up a high ranking. Depending on how far into the dark side you are, the customers can be unaware of what you’re doing, or they can be absolutely infuriated.

On one end of this spectrum, you can load a page with keywords; maybe use some cloaking and some doorway pages, that sort of thing. On the absolute other end of the spectrum, you could use adware and spyware to deliver your advertising.

While many white hatters will pooh-pooh the more aggressive marketers, the ultimate authority on what is white hat and what is black hat is Google. To make this whole thing more confusing, they change their mind regularly on what they like and what they don’t. Yesterdays perfectly white hat technique is today’s black hat. And so it goes.

Tags: Black, Disting, Easily, White