I mention on my introduction page that quick wins can be achieved, but are not always stable. A term within SEO circles is ‘Black Hat techniques’; these are the techniques which quickly deliver results, but can get a website penalised or even banned from the Search Engines. The opposite of Black Hat is unsurprisingly White Hat.

White Hat techniques are deemed as practices that in the eyes of the Search Engines enhance the user experience, by making a website more appealing and therefore receive stronger visibility and positioning.

Most organisations and individuals who offer Search Engine Optimisation are from the ‘White Hat’ group, you can tell because they explain that the process will take time, and don’t guarantee results.

There are other individuals and organisations who offer a cheap service and solid guarantees. These guarantees may seem great, but you are leaving yourself open to constantly requiring the service to receive the results. You would be better off having a basic understanding of the fundamentals of Search Engine friendly websites.

I wouldn’t say all of these cheap offers with guarantees are related to Black Hat techniques but many are. Good practice SEO will always require a level of involvement from the website owner, the problem with cheap guarantees is that from the outset this involvement is not apparent.

If your website has had SEO work completed and you really don’t know what has been done to help improve its rankings. For all you know Black Hat techniques could have been used. You could initially see great results, but over time lose your ranking or even become banned from the Search Engines. Trust is an important factor of the relationship you have with Search Engine Marketing gurus, buy services from reputable sources that have their name or brand on the line.

When talking to web professionals about Black Hat SEO, I have found varied perceptions:

• Some are insulted that you even mention the existence of Black Hat techniques, almost as if they do not exist and if we don’t talk about them they might go away.
• Some don’t understand or secretly wish they could understand these practices for their own gain. Therefore become agitated that they are being discussed.
• Some people think you are prying, and presume you think they might be Black Hat practitioner.
•  Some people have the mindset that a website is the property of its owner and that owner should be able to do what they wish. This is true, but if you want to work in partnership with the Search Engines and gain traffic from their results, you have to play ball.
• The group of people I prefer to align with are the ones that understand these techniques exist and are willing to talk about them to educate others. After all, if someone is willing to take your money and put your website at risk, it’s better to see the warning signs.

I find it important to understand what can get a website banned and to understand what approach others will take to gain results. Most of the time the approach isn’t unacceptable, it’s the automation and the rate that it is carried out which makes it unfair, and therefore abuses the Search Engine ranking criteria.

So what are these techniques, well they vary, it’s based around automation of processes but taken to the extreme. I come from an IT background and believe that anyone should automate their day to day tasks. If they don’t, it takes more time and costs more money. Even the Search Engines are automated programs; as they wouldn’t have the time to manually verify all websites that are included within their results.

But, there’s a difference between working smart and creating an unfair advantage by abusing the system.  Black Hat techniques abuse the fine line of what makes certain practices acceptable. For example:

• If a website displays relevant content to its users by automatically checking where the user is geographically located, then serves information which is tailored to services or products specially created for that location. This is great, as it improves the user experience.
• If a user hasn’t been to a website before, it would make sense to display a link to a sign up page and summary of what options are available to them. 

These are perfectly acceptable practices, but where the line is drawn is when a website would deliberately display one version of itself to all human visitors and a totally different version of itself to the Search Engines. A version that meets the Search Engine ranking criteria but is not legitimately created and would most likely deter human visitors.

This abuses the Search Engine results, because it tricks the search engine into thinking you are offering something which you’re not. These practices used to be more common place, but now Search Engines are employing human editors to do manual checks.  People who employ this Black Hat tactic are now finding that their website will initially be included in results, but quickly banned after a few weeks. Good news for anyone who has a legitimate website and practices White Hat SEO techniques.

Google is good at picking up on this; the smaller Search Engines do not have the budget to employ the same level of human editing. Therefore Google will provide better results, one of the reasons why Google is so popular.

There are many other techniques people use to abuse the Search Engine ranking criteria; I am a White Hat Search Engine Optimisation practitioner. But I feel it is important to understand these techniques to educate my clients about what is right, and what is wrong. I also need an understanding to judge practices for myself, I can then make educated decisions about what is and isn’t acceptable in the eyes of the Search Engines.  In reality, no one can make a judgement without a level of understanding.

Please contact me if you wish to discuss how I can help apply best practices techniques to your website and Search Engine Marketing efforts. I am located in Southampton, Hampshire but I am happy to work with clients throughout the UK.

Lee

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