SEO Articles

The world of search engine optimisation can be a fickle one, full of back-biting and contradictory opinions. There are two main schools of thought in SEO, the unfortunately monickered: 'White hat' SEO's and 'Black hat' SEO's.

The search engine optimisation web forums are where the two factions meet, the strains of Do Not Forsake Me gentle on the breeze as each side engages in a sometimes bitter war of words against the other. It's a division of 'good' and 'bad' with the white hats naturally assuming the Gary Cooper role and the black hats demonised as the evil Miller gang.

Sometimes it pays to take a step back and regard the two camps whilst wearing the 'non-judgemental' hat.

As previously stated white hat is seen as good SEO, and is follows the search engine regulations that are brought in to fight spammers and keep such undesirables from the organic listings. However, it also pays to bear in mind that the world and the definitions are ever-changing and what was once regarded as white hat may now be marked as black.

White hat SEO's produce content and pages with the user as well as the search engine in mind. They will include useful information and text that engages a human being and doesn't solely attempt to influence the search engine algorithm. Keywords will be used naturally, allowing the text to flow, and not crowbarred in as an afterthought or overused to the point of saturation. Links will be organically grown because there is something worth linking to. Google particularly espouses this as they treat inbound links as a vote of confidence for the pages to which they point.

White hat SEO is a gradual process that takes time. But putting in that extra effort and staying within the rules should see results and maintain them in the long run.

Those that doff the black hat in SEO are frowned upon by the search engines and considered bad as they will employ techniques that are solely aimed at fooling the search engine into giving a website a higher ranking. A brief rundown of some of these heinous techniques follows:

NB. PLEASE DO NOT TRY THESE AT HOME! (unless accompanied by a responsible adult)

Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is perhaps the oldest and most popular of the dark arts. It involves choosing high value keywords and filling the text, meta and title tags with them. In the early days this was all you needed to propel a site up through the rankings, as the search engines were naïve and easily played. Nowadays it relatively easy to detect and such tactics will get you penalised and possibly banned.

Link Farming
Link farms were set up to provide easy sources of inbound links to a site. Once again they were very popular in the days of yore and even in these enlightened times websites still utilise them. A link farm will be page after page of unrelated links (in direct contrast to a directory, which is categorised links and presently acceptable) and they will pass on little or no value. If found linking back to such an undesirable site (or 'bad neighbourhood'), the penalties will be forthcoming.

Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are pages that are highly optimised and made specifically to rank highly in the search engines. These will then lead on to the actual site, whether through an action on the page or a redirect. Search engines disapprove of such tactics, as the page has been built solely for their benefit and not that of the user.

Cloaking
A practice that is tied in with the idea of doorway pages is cloaking. Illegitimate use of cloaking would be to present a page to the search engines that has been optimised to rank well and an alternative one to the user. For whatever purpose you should choose to do this, it is best avoided, as discovery will once again do more harm than good.

Hidden Text
Hidden text does what it says on the tin. A favourite of old, and its purest form relatively easy to detect. It would involve hiding keywords and phrases upon the page through such ingenious methods as making the text the same colour as the background, shrinking the font value to 0 pixels, or  placing single pixel images upon the page and filling the ALT attribute with keywords. There are other, more modern methods used (such as hiding text with CSS) that can have a legitimate function, but if you're caught cheating, expect the worst.

These are just a choice pick of the many techniques that make up the black hat stable, highlighted to demonstrate the differences in the two camps. Some, such as cloaking or certain types of hidden text fall under the blanket of the 'Grey hat', along with paid links, in that their use can be interpreted as having a legitimate function. Take cloaking, for instance, there may well be a reason why you need to present one page to the search engine and another to the user – in the case of a dynamic page that would otherwise be invisible to a search engine – but still it remains a high-risk tactic and one that will probably see you banned if discovered.

The black hat can render short-term results. But remember, the search engines evolve and will continue to do so. Even if their filters do bypass a dubious technique or two, it will only be a matter of time before they catch up. And then there's also your competitors or maybe just a user who feels it is his civic duty to report your site for spamming. Are you prepared to accept what could quite possibly be an outright ban?

SEO advice: Cover your  back and play by the rules.