Hats

Kanaga Siva asked:


The goal of all webmasters is to ensure that their websites will be popular with the top search engines, continue to remain popular and secure top Search Engine Placement. To achieve this some of them instead of adopting White Hat SEO Techniques resort to adopting certain Black Hat SEO Techniques. Some of the Black Hat SEO Techniques adopted by certain website owners are, having hidden texts, stuffing keywords, cloaking, having doorway pages and duplicate sites.

These are illegal and unethical techniques. Their sites might achieve great short term success but once detected, the consequences can be drastic such as the search engines penalizing their websites or even banning them.

Website owners who play the game according to the guidelines and do not attempt to deceive the visitors and the search engines are said to employ White Hat SEO techniques. They adopt these techniques to give real value to their visitors first, while at the same time satisfying the search engines by some of the important techniques indicated below.

Quality Content:

It is a well known fact that Content is King. Hence creating quality content should be the prime concern. It should be related to the theme or category of your website and useful to your visitors. The more unique and rich the content is, the more it will be appreciated by your visitors. Unique quality content websites with authoritative articles always attract the search engines.

Webmasters too are often attracted by such content and they will be keen to link to your website to give their website visitors a great experience. This linking will provide you with one way inbound links which are greatly appreciated by the search engines and will have a positive impact on your search engine rankings. In addition you can expect a regular stream of visitors from these websites too.

Site Optimization:

Site optimization is of prime importance and should be done in the most effective manner to achieve high search engine placement. While providing useful and valuable theme related content to the visitor, the content should be optimized to attract the search engines. This is what site optimization is all about. The technique adopted here is to position your keywords or keyword phrases in the title, headlines, meta tags and also in the content so as to appear quite natural in the flow of the content. Avoid placing excessive keywords in the content. This is known as keyword stuffing and your site could be penalized for it.

Reciprocal Links:

Obtaining reciprocal links is one of the popular SEO techniques adopted by webmasters. Though reciprocal links are not very much in favor with the search engines these days because of certain unethical practices by certain webmasters, nevertheless they are very much appreciated if they are from quality theme related websites.

You should at all costs avoid Bad Neighborhoods. These are websites that have been penalized or banned by search engines. Similarly avoid Link Farms too. These sites have an assorted collection of hundreds of links in every page without any categorization and linked to each other. By linking to these sites you take the risk of being penalized by the search engines.

Conclusion:

All these White Hat methods are no doubt a slow and painstaking process but if done systematically and patiently they will collectively help you achieve high search engine placement.



FRED

Chuck Aikens asked:


variety of SEO methods are available that will work to improve the search engine rankings of web sites and their individual pages. Some of these techniques are thought to be sound and ethical, while others can be considered risky and manipulative. Various SEO marketers use at least one if not both of these methods with different degrees of success.

Internet marketers call safe, non-manipulative techniques White Hat SEO, while less reputable methods are referred to as Black Hat techniques. Some examples of White Hat SEO include optimizing META tags, putting keywords in URLs, submitting sites to directories, making sitemaps, obtaining links on related sites, and creating keyword-optimized content. These techniques help search engines locate relevant pages people are looking for. Search engines encourage such methods through services like Google Webmaster Tools.

On the other hand, Black Hat SEO includes efforts like redirecting search engine “spiders” to different pages than human visitors see, mass-posting “spam” comments (on blogs, forums, articles), or putting lists of keywords at the end of each page in very small fonts. Black hat methods may actually reduce the quality of search engine results. Some of these SEO strategies try to deceive users into visiting sites about subjects they don’t have any interest in, which puts them at odds with the purpose of search engines.

So how does White Hat compare vs. Black Hat for marketers and web site operators? Black Hat SEO methods can sometimes be faster and easier to use. However, they run the risk of causing search engines to downgrade or remove a site from results. In the long-term, they sometimes become ineffective; search engines usually catch on to each Black Hat technique after it is introduced, often penalizing sites which have used it.

White Hat SEO remains more time-consuming, but it yields better long-term results and has a more positive impact. People prefer to use web sites they haven’t been deceived into visiting, and search engines don’t like to list sites which have manipulated their way to a high ranking. Sites using white hatted techniques usually don’t have to worry about being removed from search engine results.

However, it remains important to carry out White Hat SEO techniques correctly and effectively. Using white hatted methods excessively or improperly can turn them into Black Hatted techniques. For example, posting linked comments on related blogs isn’t considered very problematic, but using software to submit huge quantities of identical or irrelevant comments is definitely viewed as a Black Hat technique.

White Hat SEO methods, if done properly, can actually product the best long-term outcome and create a greater impact on the web in general. Several once-common Black Hat techniques have fallen into disuse after search engines successfully developed ways to detect them.

RUBIN

Scott Lindsay asked:


If you have heard the term “Black Hat SEO” then you know the term is applied negatively to websites that use methods of optimizing their website that are frowned on by search engines. In fact, these search engines will ban these sites from their rankings when they are discovered (and they almost always are).

There is another term used for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) referred to as “White Hat”, and just like the movie westerns of yesteryear you get the picture that there is a struggle between good and bad between these optimization approaches.

Newsweek reported in a December 19th, 2005 article, “[Search engines] are increasingly tolerant of ethical or “white hat” [SEOs], who primarily help their clients knock down the virtual walls that prevent search engines from fully indexing their site.”

To be clear, search engines view “Black Hat” SEO as spam while “White Hat” SEO is not only accepted, it is encouraged. Matt Cutts from Google has said, “To Google, SEO only becomes spam when it goes against our quality guidelines and moves into things like hidden text, hidden links, cloaking, or sneaky redirects…Truthfully, much of the best SEO is common-sense: making sure that a site’s architecture is crawlable, coming up with useful content or services that has the words that people search for, and looking for smart marketing angles so that people find out about your site.”

Now imagine a business owner looking for ways to pay the least amount on their income tax. They have every right to do so, but there comes a point when numbers are incorrectly manipulated to reduce the individual tax burden. Chances are pretty good that sometime in the future this individual is going to get caught.

“White Hat” SEO practitioners understand there is acceptable rules and they will frame their strategies within those rules because to ‘get caught’ using unethical SEO practices could mean saying goodbye to your ability to let the most people know about your existence on the web.

“Black Hat” SEO is often a sign of desperation. Because proper SEO techniques can take a while to be recognized and applied to search engine rankings many businesses who may feel their chance at business success is slipping away may resort to “Black Hat” techniques and end up banned from search engines in the process.

I can’t fault people for wanting business success sooner, but the moderate use of PPC advertising can help offset that ‘in-between’ time when you are waiting for “White Hat” SEO strategies to kick in.

In our next article we’ll answer the question, “What are some SEO strategies that are considered ‘White Hat’?”



JIMMIE

Shashi Priya asked:


The impression you want to give your customers will define the type of SEO campaign you run, and the type of provider you choose:

Believe it or not, there are such things as unethical SEO campaigns; the authorities call this down-and-dirty practice “Black Hat SEO”. Though Black Hat started out as just “hedging” the rules of search engine optimization, it soon went overboard.

One practice of Black Hat SEO service providers is called “keyword stuffing”. For more details go to www.greatseosecrets.com This method involves taking long lists of keywords and stuffing them into a web page, hoping the search engines will give the page a higher ranking. Another method is invisible text – white text on a white background. The user never sees it, but the search engines will.

Black Hat tactics do work, but only if you want your site to go higher for a short amount of time – before it’s penalized. Like the good sheriffs of old, search engine spiders will eventually notice the trickery, as will your customers when they click on a page and see nothing but “blah blah long tail key phrase blah”.

This isn’t to say that White Hat SEO service providers are everything good, right and holy; there are unethical practices here, as well. However, these unethical practices are the kind that any buyer is used to: frauds, no work for all pay, etc. You can avoid companies of this type by doing research and asking for references.

White Hat methods include such things as keyword research, using keywords in good content, coding and many more. Like any marketing campaign, a SEO campaign takes time. White Hat methods are set in structured steps so that the campaign is constantly building power; instead of spiking your ratings to the top, you’ll see a gradual rise.

Blue Hat Strategies

There’s a trend rising through the SEO service providers called “Blue Hat” SEO. This is a mix of Black and White Hat SEO; its focus is to use the most advanced techniques of both practices to achieve the greatest, and most long lasting, results. Though still in its youth, Blue Hat SEO does have a large following, and is quickly growing to become a full-blown strategy of its own.

No matter which SEO service providers you look at, remember one thing: Running a SEO campaign takes time. Any provider that tells you they can have your site at #1 in a week is a provider you need to drop.

As most SEO service providers know, your competitors are rarely the companies you thought they were. For more details go to www.thesearchengineprimer.com with businesses that aren’t web based, the competition is easier to find; if you sell medical supplies, other companies that sell them are your competitors. It’s not so clear-cut with internet marketing, however.

If you’re starting at the bottom as a new website owner, it’s an unrealistic outlook to consider the head dogs – who have been in place for years – as your competition; good SEO service providers will tell you this. When building a web-based business, the competition isn’t necessarily those that sell what you sell. Instead, you’re competing for placement, with SEO as a main way to wrestle your way to the top of the Google SERP (search engine results page) dog pile; and SEO means keywords. Those keywords are the first step to finding your direct competition.



MAURICIO

Chris Angus asked:


A discussion of black hat and white hat SEO is as pointless as a discussion of the difference between black and white witchcraft. In witchcraft, the minute a technique is used to control the outcome of a situation it is known as black magic. The same can be said of SEO. A technique used to manipulate the search engines is known as black hat SEO. The problem is that white hat SEO does precisely the same thing so it is not any less “dirty” than black hat in some ways

An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered “White hat” if it conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and does not attempt to deceive it. White Hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.

White Hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then make that content easily accessible to their spiders. It is more about user friendliness and accessibility rather than about tilting the odds seriously in one’s favor.

Black hat” SEO employs more deceptive methods to try to improve rankings. The search engines usually disapprove these methods. This can range from text that is “hidden”, either as text colored similar to the background or by redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly. As a general rule, a method that sends a user to a page that was different to the page described in the search is called Black hat. Search engines can and do penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines’ algorithms, or by a manual review of a site.



LINWOOD

Chuck Crawford asked:


A couple of days ago I received an email, from a mailing list that I am subscribed to I might add, that was touting the wonders of a new piece of software called SE Nuke.

(No, I am not an affiliate, but it is only fair to add a link to their website when doing a review. I saw a few other reviews that were not linking to the SE Nuke website, which I think is very unfair.)

So just what is SE Nuke?

According to the SE Nuke site, it’s “the most powerful search engine optimization software ever created”.

Obviously, I was intrigued. Could this new piece of software automate the processes I’ve been using manually for quite some time now? Could SE Nuke reduce my work day? Really triple my bottom line? Help me dominate the first three pages of Google like the sales page says?

Yes say Joe Russell and Areeb Bajwa, SE Nuke’s developers / promoters.

But when reading on, I had my doubts. You see, I’ve been working online for over 13 years. Designing, developing, and optimizing websites for solid search engine performance. Along the way learning many valuable methods of backlinking, link baiting, and link building in order to obtain long term placement in the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages).

One thing that I have learned about building solid, LONG TERM, SEO results is that there are absolutely no shortcuts. No magic bullets, no where to buy magic beans on the way to market that will lead to the golden goose. No sir, some of the wording on the SE Nuke sales page is disturbing. At least to me, because I happen to know that some of the tactics SE Nuke offers will eventually hurt your website more than it will help it.

SE Nuke sounds like a good idea, and the methods it uses really are good for SEO optimization of a website if you were to do them all manually. The SE Nuke developers have put together a really nice, FREE, ebook to download that offers very valuable advice to users wishing to manually optimize their website.

Understand, this review is not a slam on SE Nuke, or Joe Russell and Areeb Bajwa. I did in fact read the entire e-book that they are giving away, and it does give some generic, but sound SEO advice. Using social bookmarking, video sites, web 2.0 sites, and hub pages IS an excellent method for SEO and SERP domination.

But where I have to differ is when I hear really disturbing wording that over the years, time and time again, I’ve seen sites be cast into the bowels of the blacklist. The ever dreaded search engine exclusion. The blackhat SEO hell.

SE Nuke claims to automate processes that should not be automated.

Think about the spam you receive each and every day in your email. This is automated spam, generated by hackers and spammers that send out millions of unwanted solicitations daily. Clogging the internet and your inbox with garbage and junk.

Now compare this to the top websites online. If you were the owner of one of these monsters, like http://www.youtube.com or http://www.propeller.com (owned by Google and Netscape / AOL respectively), wouldn’t you be working feverishly to provide quality content to your users? Wouldn’t you spend some of that multi million dollar budget working on thwarting the efforts of duplicate content? Of course you would.

SE Nuke talks about ’spinning’ titles, creating hundreds of article variations from seed articles, and tricking the search engines.

When I read this, especially the ‘tricking the search engines’ comment, I had the urge to hide my url’s and run for the hills. If you have been online for any amount of time, you know for a fact that efforts to ‘trick the search engines’ are always, I repeat, ALWAYS countered by the same search engines you are trying to trick into giving you the listing.

Further, SE Nuke really shocked me by insinuating that you should actually use someone else’s article, and then create variations of that article (SE Nuke calls this a seed article). This is stealing my friends. It’s copyright violation at the very least, and it’s not the first time a piece of software has tried to get this by the search engines and their algorithms. No, it’s been tried before, and it always fails. It always turns out badly for the people that believe it’s a shortcut. Don’t steal the hard work of another writer, please. It’s bad karma at the very least, and certainly not good business ethics.

Tricking, spinning, and seeding, are black hat SEO tactics. Period.

Yes, you might in fact nab the first three pages in Google by using the black hat SEO tactics offered by SE Nuke. You might even have them for some time. But ultimately, you will lose these listings. Because Google is smart. AOL is smart. Yahoo is smart. These are fortune 500 companies my friends, and if you think that they are going to offer poor results for their users for any length of time, you are mistaken. They have giant staffs, people who work for them that are looking for programs like SE Nuke, in order to continue to provide excellent search results on their SERP pages.

Nope, SE Nuke is not the long term magic bullet, because the magic bullet for good SEO simply does not exist. If you are serious about making the web a viable, long term source of income, then it takes a viable, long term plan.

It takes work.

You want to take your website to the top of the search engine listings? Then you need to do the work necessary. You need good SEO. You need a plan. Then you need to follow through with that plan.

No software in the world, including SE Nuke, is going to do that work for you. No SEO automation is a good idea for long term business development. Ever.

When you read the words ‘trick’ or ’spin’ or ’seed’, run away. Run away fast.

Know what you are going into if you decide to buy and use SE Nuke. Know that you might get much more than you bargained for in the long run.



SAM

Chris Young asked:


SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to a set of techniques that are performed on a website with the intention of increasing its search engine rankings. SEO can be performed during the programming stages, while planning and producing content, and by exchanging links or by building one-way links.

Now SEO is big business because if performed well it has the potential to catapult a website to the top of the search engine rankings. Getting on top of search engine rankings is like getting free front-page exposure in an oracle that caters to a billion Dollar market. Naturally, websites are keen to make it to the top and this has generated a massive demand for SEO firms.

Well, there are two types of SEO techniques - Ethical, also known as White Hat SEO and Unethical, also called Black Hat SEO. The lure of getting prime exposure has brought to the surface many firms and individuals who try to adopt unscrupulous SEO techniques to fool the search engines into giving a website top exposure. Of course, there are those too who work by the book - this is how both these techniques work:

WHITE HAT SEO TECHNIQUES

White hat SEO techniques are solid, credible, quality techniques that ensure that a website gets to the top and stays there. Here are some of the popular ones:

1. Great Content: For SEO purposes content is not just king - it is the emperor. If you upload quality content that is well written, informative and entertaining, then search engines will fall in love with your website. Of course, you must ensure that keywords relevant to your website’s theme are built into your content. Search engine algorithms are always on the lookout for websites that provide quality content that is of use to their surfers - so, well, content rules.

2. Programming techniques: SEO while programming a website involves placing search-engine-friendly text in the meta tags, building a clear and concise website structure that can bring up the searched-for content in a jiffy, using structural mark-ups, and building in tags in the title, subtitles and the footers of every content page.

3. Solid keyword research and use: Before developing content, you must figure out the most popular keywords relevant for your website’s theme. To do this you will have to conduct a thorough research using keyword tools provided by major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Some SEO firms also use third-party software such as WordTracker for keyword analysis. Once SEO firms get their finger on the most expensive and effective keywords, they skillfully build them into the content.

4. Link building: SEO firms trade links with other reputed websites. When a website’s links spread, its search engine rankings automatically go up. Nowadays, may website owners get articles written and submit them to reprint directories, where other websites who need content can pick them up. Of course, the trick in article submission lies in including a resource box at the end of the article that points back to your website.

BLACK HAT SEO TECHNIQUES

Unscrupulous SEO firms use black hat SEO techniques to fool the search engines. These techniques are shortcuts that can take you here and there, but ultimately lead to a dead end. Here are some of the common black hat SEO techniques:

1. Veiled content: The website is stuffed with popular keywords that form part of the background color scheme, and hence are not visible to a surfer. The idea is to trick the search engine into picking up the hidden content.

2. Keyword-spammed content: There are SEO firms who do not get quality content written - instead, they plug in all blah-blah content that is spammed with keywords. The idea is the same - to trick the search engines.

3. Redirecting: Many unscrupulous SEO firms own a bunch of websites that have already been indexed by search engines. When you approach them for SEO, they may plant a code on their existing websites redirecting their links back to your website.

4. Cloaking: Using this technique, SEO firms direct specified content towards search engine spiders but do not hoist it on the website, because it is useless.

5. Tag spam: Meta-tags and other tags of a website, which are used by search engine spiders to quick-reference or index a website are spammed with keywords using this technique.

6. Links from link farms: Link farms represent a humungous amount of useless, content-less websites. Unscrupulous SEO firms use these link farms for building backlinks.

Black Hat SEO can finish a website

Remember that if you use black hat SEO tricks on your website, you might as well write it off. That is because search engine algorithms are getting smarter by the day and now can sniff out useless content, hidden text, redirections and other foul SEO methods. Once search engines figure out that a website is up to mischief then they blacklist it - and once blacklisted, a website is suspended from the search engine’s index and is not picked up until and unless all the black hat SEO is removed. Plus, when a website’s visitors come to know that it is using black hat techniques they will get put off and stay away from it.

To sum up, black hat SEO techniques can destroy a website or business opportunity, while white hat SEO techniques can make it flourish in the long run. Go ahead, make your choice!



WESTON

Ankit Talwar asked:


A black hat (also called a cracker or Darkside hacker) is a malicious or criminal hacker. This term is seldom used outside of the security industry and by some modern programmers. The general public uses the term hacker to refer to the same thing. In computer jargon the meaning of “hacker” can be much broader. The name comes from the opposite of White Hat hackers.

Usually a Black Hat is a person who uses their knowledge of vulnerabilities and exploits for private gain, rather than revealing them either to the general public or the manufacturer for correction. Many Black Hats promote individual freedom and accessibility over privacy and security[citation needed]. Black Hats may seek to expand holes in systems; any attempts made to patch software are generally done to prevent others from also compromising a system they have already obtained secure control over. A Black Hat hacker may have access to 0-day exploits (private software that exploits security vulnerabilities; 0-day exploits have not been distributed to the public). In the most extreme cases, Black Hats may work to cause damage maliciously, and/or make threats to do so as blackmail.

Black-hat hacking is the act of compromising the security of a system without permission from an authorized party, usually with the intent of accessing computers connected to the network (the somewhat similar activity of defeating copy prevention devices in software - which may or may not be legal depending on the laws of the given country - is actually software cracking). The term cracker was coined by Richard Stallman to provide an alternative to using the existing word hacker for this meaning. Use of the term “cracker” is mostly limited (as is “black hat”) to some areas of the computer and security field and even there is considered controversial. A definition of a group that calls themselves hackers refers to “a group that consists of skilled computer enthusiasts”. The other, and more common usage, refers to those who attempt to gain unauthorized access to computer systems. Many members of the first group attempt to convince people that intruders should be called crackers rather than hackers, but the common usage remains ingrained.

Techniques for breaking into systems can involve advanced programming skills and social engineering, but more commonly will simply be the use of semi-automatic software, developed by others - often without understanding how the software itself works. Crackers who rely on the latter technique are often referred to as script kiddies. Common software weaknesses exploited include buffer overflow, integer overflow, memory corruption, format string attacks, race conditions, cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, code injection and SQL injection bugs.

The reference to colored hats comes from Hollywood’s use of hats in old black-and-white Western movies to help an audience differentiate between the good guys (white hats) and the bad guys (black hats). The ‘hat’ terms do not fall under common use. Even inside the computing field they are very controversial.

A grey hat commonly refers to a hacker who releases information about any exploits or security holes they find openly to the public. They do so without concern for how the information is used in the end (whether for patching or exploiting).

Ankit Talwar - Web Designer



NORMAN