SEO: Black Hat or White?
If you’ve been into this online marketing world of ours for a while, you probably understand the difference between “white hat” techniques as opposed to “black hat” SEO. If not, let me explain a bit.
White hat techniques are tried and true. They’re about doing everything “naturally”—adding great content to your site and others; creating links back from article directories, human edited directories, and social media sites; optimizing your pages with great titles and descriptions, and so on. All of these methods will accumulate and get you great rankings in the search engines… over time.
Black hat techniques are more immediate. They’re things you can do right now that will make your search engine rankings soar, and they absolutely do work… until you get caught. Then, your pages could be banned from the search engines entirely, if the things you’re doing are enough to really piss the powers off. Then, when these activites stop working, the black hatters just devise some new scheme that they put all their efforts into until the search engines catch on and the whole cycle begins again.
Is black hat bad? I mean morally wrong? Well… it’s kind of a grey area, but probably not. Search engines aren’t people. But here’s where the grey comes in… Black hatters make it bad for search engine users because all that they might see on a search results page is one website. So, in a way, I guess it’s not a good thing, right? I mean, it seems pretty unethical to me.
But that’s not why I advise against it. I wouldn’t waste my time with black hat stuff. If you plan to be in business online for a long time, why tarnish your reputation with the search engines? I mean, they really do matter to you as a businessperson. You want them to send you targeted, free traffic forever, right?
So, why waste time doing stuff that will not only get you into trouble, but be worthless eventually? I’d rather put my efforts into the tried and true—stuff that will last forever. My road to the pot of gold might be longer, but it won’t turn to mud under my feet.
