White Hat SEO is optimizing your site within the parameters that the search engines set up to provide a better user experience. It is always legal.
Black Hat SEO is using tricks to game the system and rarely gives the reader any benefits. Some of the Black Hat SEO tricks could lead to lawsuits and can be illegal.
When optimizing your site stay away from Black Hat techniques. If you are caught using Black Hat SEO techniques you will be banned from the search engines. Any small gains from using these techniques could be permanently lost. In 2006 BMW Germany was banned from Google for using Black Hat SEO tricks.
Some Black Hat SEO techniques to avoid:
- Hidden Text or Links
- Sneaky Redirects
- Keyword Stuffing
- Creating multiple pages with duplicate content
- Malware
- Doorway pages with content unrelated to the rest of your site.
Do not try to trick the search engines. With Google employing almost 20,000 people and numerous PhD’s, they will not be fooled by one blogger’s Black Hat tricks. Write for your readers and optimize so they can find you.
Savvy Blogging is all about playing by the rules, not breaking them.
More on White Hat SEO to come…
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Mommy Snacks Reply:
July 12th, 2010 at 9:50 pm
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It simply baffles me how many SEO experts will quickly denounce Cloaking as “unethical” or against Google’s TOS or even label it as spam which manipulates search results but then on a daily basis create artificial, manual or software generated backlinks for clients.
If you are distributing countless articles with links or posting on blogs/forums to obtain backlinks or using automated backlinking software, isn’t that also spamming to manipulate search engine results?
What is the difference? It all violates Google’s TOS.
So does “blackhat” or being “unethical” really exist anymore? Isn’t this really about traffic, conversions and surviving within an ever tightening monopoly created by Google for which we now are left with few other options, unless to line the pockets of Google shareholders.
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