Black Hat versus White Hat SEO
So, where do you stand - the clean and clear side of things or do you dwell into the darker, questionable kind of things. There is always a gray area. In most professions, and even in personal life, we often run into decisions that we have to make where there really is no wrong on right, at least the law doesn’t mention it. That’s when we have to take one side, the side that we believe in and touches us stronger than the other. That’s when we need to decide whether we let ourselves get greedy and carried away or stand by and do the right thing.
One such situation the choice between Black Hat SEO versus White Hat SEO. In the world of SEO, there are several techniques and methods that one can use to get higher rankings on search engines, that are not conventional. They attempt to get the better of search engine algorithms and artificially achieve rankings that the page may not otherwise rank for. These are called Black Hat SEO techniques. Some of the common ones are mentioned here for your reference:
- Keyword stuffing 1: Invisible text: Use keyword text that is the same color as a page’s background
- Keyword stuffing 2: Hide the text: Add keywords behind other visual elements such as images so you don’t see them on the page but they are there.
- Keyword stuffing 3: Small font text: Keywords in really small font placed along the top, bottom or sides of a web page.
- Doorway Pages: Pages that never display to the visitor but are there only so search engine spiders can see and list them. These pages redirect to the actual page that sells the product.
There are plenty more of these to go by. There are entire forums dedicated to these techniques - http://www.blackhatworld.com/. But here’s our stand on this: DO NOT DO IT. The reason should come from your business ethics, but if that’s not enough, just know that search engines are not stupid. They will get you and when they do, you will lose all your work because of a little bit of greed. About.com puts it well
Black Hat SEO is tempting; after all, these tricks actually do work, temporarily. They do end up getting sites higher search rankings; that is, until these same sites get banned for using unethical practices. It’s just not worth the risk. Use efficient search engine optimization techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like Black Hat SEO. Here’s a few articles that can get you on the road to knowing search engine optimization:
In reality, every professional SEO knows to stay away from these for the long-term. There are sites that sometimes need to be successful only temporarily, for instance, before the day of the elections, Etc. However, even for those, there is no point in using Black Hat. Search Engines could block out an entire IP. If you are on shared hosting, that could affect other sites using the same IP. You could be doing harm for you and others.
There are other harder decisions. Ones that are no all black or white. These are the hardest. Our next topic is regarding practises that are commonplace but debatable.
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