Black Hat SEO World

There is a lot of information available on the web about this thing called black hat seo. What exactly is it? Basically it is the practice of hoodwinking the search engines into pushing your website higher in the rankings. How is this done you ask? There are many methods of accomplishing the end result (higher rankings), but it should be understood that you are potentially setting yourself up for the exact opposite (lower rankings and/or removal from the search engine index).
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Posted by Michael Martinez on June 9, 2008 in Advanced SEO
Todd Friesen passed on a light-hearted comment to me this morning from someone who thought I might enjoy participating in the controversial discussion Lisa Barone started on the Bruce Clay blog with her review of SMX Advanced 2008. I think I’ll pass on directly adding my two cents but the points that Lisa, Danny Sullivan, Vanessa Fox, and a few others make about what is and isn’t black hat, cutting edge SEO, etc. got me to wondering.
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Author Michael Jeffreys personally interviewed 15 top motivational gurus in 1997 for his then upcoming book. After talking to gurus from Brian Tracy to Dr. Wayne Dyer, he distilled 8 Secrets to Success they all agreed upon. These secrets are still good today and are as follows:
1. Take 100% Responsibility for Your Life – In a society where people blame everything from their parents to the government for failure, those who don’t buy into this mentality or succumb to the “victim” thinking succeed. To blame something or somebody outside yourself is saying they have control of your life and not you. Someone else’s opinion of you doesn’t have to become your reality.
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Top 16 SEO Myths
Things you “know” which aren’t so
1. I have to submit my site to a search engine for it to get listed.
FACT: Submission is unnecessary. A search engine will always find your site as long as some other site links to it. I never submit my sites to the search engines.
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Google makes it clear that it disapproves of certain SEO tactics, such as hiding keywords with invisible text, or showing one page to Google’s spider and another to actual human visitors. (See what Google recommends and what they don’t.) Methods that conform to what the search engines like are called White Hat SEO, and disapproved methods are called Black Hat SEO. There is a lot of controversy about whether Black Hat SEO is really “bad” in the ethical sense. White Hatters say that Black Hatters are unfairly trying to manipulate the SERPs. Black Hatters counter, “What constitutes ‘fair’? Isn’t any change you make to your page for SEO purposes an attempt to influence rankings? Why is one method less pure than another when we’re all just trying to get our pages to rank higher? Further, if an engine is ranking a bunch of irrelevant sites above mine, what’s so wrong about using any method at my disposal to get my relevant site ranked above them? Doing so doesn’t benefit just me, it benefits the searchers because it gives them what they’re searching for. And it also benefits the engine, because searchers will think better of the engine for giving them more relevant results than it would have otherwise.”
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What is Black Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization gone bad)
Black hat practitioners tend to see search engine optimization as a war, and search engines as the enemy to be beaten by all means fair or foul. White hatters tend to view search engines as allies, who can help drive business to their clients’ sites.
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The fight to top search engines’ results knows no limits – neither ethical, nor technical. There are often reports of sites that have been temporarily or permanently excluded from Google and the other search engines because of malpractice and using “black hat” SEO optimization techniques. The reaction of search engines is easy to understand – with so many tricks and cheats that SEO experts include in their arsenal, the relevancy of returned results is seriously compromised to the point where search engines start to deliver completely irrelevant and manipulated search results. And even if search engines do not discover your scams right away, your competitors might report you.
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