SEO Wordsmith

In the world of SEO, Black hat is sort of like Darth Vader (hence, the black hat) and white are the rebels (not the stormtroopers, roll with me on this).  As we’ve seen time and time again in movies, the bad guys usually win initially, but in the long run, it’s the good guys who win out.  Search engine optimization is pretty much the same.  Black hat tactics can be effective in the short term, but it’s white hat tactics that have actual longevity.

So here’s a secret about black hat tactics: they work.  If they didn’t work, people wouldn’t do them.  Not only do they work, but they can work better than white hat SEO.  So what’s the hitch?  The hitch is that black hat tactics only work for the short term until Google figures out the new black hat scheme and bans it in the terms and conditions.  While white hat SEO can’t rank a site overnight, over time ranking becomes stronger using tactics that are not likely to get banned by Google or other engines in the present or future.

That’s not always the case.  While writing content and getting backlinks are probably not going to go out of style, certain SEO tactics were once perfectly legitimate and then got banned.  I started writing content (with TrafficLogic) with a mind-numbing list of search strings.  So I’d have to write 250 words of content using a keyphrase four times within the content, once in a subheading:

• Car seat cover Los Angeles
• L.A. car seat cover
• Car coverings cheap site
• Cheap car seats website L.A.

The content would come out as nonsense – but it was keyword rich!  These pages were then put up as doorway pages all linking to the same L.A. car website.  Early on, this was fine: it was a white hat practice because Google didn’t frown on it…yet. Black hat is a bit different.  It’s a way of finding a loophole in Google’s terms and conditions so it doesn’t get noticed.

In this way, black hat SEO is kind of like a computer virus.  Google’s frequently updating its virus definitions to snare new black hat tactics, and the black hatters are often one step ahead.

Why Black Hat Works

The reason that black hat works is because it’s a short-term proposition.  Black hatters flood the web using black hat strategies – such as doorway pages, interlinking between sites, hidden text, keyword stuffing in text and metatags, link spam, page hijacking, comment spam, and other issues.  Here’s a great guide to different types of black hat tactics.

Everyone may say they hate comment spam, but the fact is that a lot of it gets through – especially pingback spam.  Bloggers are just that desperate for comments, and some site owners just aren’t paying that close attention. The same goes for something like article marketing.  There are posts written about how article marketing is a dying artform because of duplicate content penalties.  That’s true, but Google is not perfect and A LOT of these bannable offenses, such as duplicate content, make it through the system.  That doesn’t mean they’re recommended, but that you can get away with it.

Search Engine Spiders are Slow

In addition, getting banned by search engines isn’t the end of the world.  A site owner can just scrub a site clean of certain bannable offenses and wait for reinstatement.  But if there are a number of external backlinks to a site, the site can still retain PR.  More importantly, though, search engine spiders just aren’t smart so they miss certain things.  If the spider does catch something, it will send an alert that is then viewed by a human checker and that process takes time.  By the time the terms and conditions are changed to alter how spiders crawl sites, the bannable offense could be scrubbed clean, or the site owner could just abandon the site to create a new one.

Which is why black hat isn’t for everyone.  If you’re a small business owner with one core website, black hat is a terrible strategy because you can’t afford the down time, let alone an abandoned site.  Black hat is better suited for quick affiliate marketing sites that try to earn quick revenue and move on – not for the flagship site of a business.  Those sites should stick to white hat SEO and be patient with link building and content generation.  Am I advocating black hat SEO?  No way, it’s not what I do: I’m a content writer, which black hatters scoff at as being a slow way to gain traction, but it’s good to know why some choose the dark side.

(New Marketplace post: Best Marketing and SEO Books)