Black hat techniques and what confuses me Options

[seobook]

I just think it is a risk / reward thing. In all reality most sites do not need to accept too much risk if they have a decent amount of cash to spend on promoting their sites.

The hat stuff is garbage, I think it is similar to a best practice or ethical label...just a bunch of bogus marketing speak to say "I am better than you."

Where the problem real comes into play is when customers hire SEO's without knowing what they are doing at all. The buyer beware thing is real, and if a person is unwilling to explain what they are doing then they are probably not worth buying services from. Much of the fault rests within the greed motive of people coupled with the laziness to not ask questions and not find out the facts.

I think the idea of knowing most of the low risk seo options really should help in determining when / if "Black Hat SEO" is required. I did make a directory of companies (Black Hat SEO.com) I thought work in bad faith or mislead people, as that is where the problem truely rests. I don't think it is important that my directory is all inclusive, just so that it has the patterns and hopefully gets people to ask questions at forums. The goal of that label should be to lead people to the answers to their quesions, and for a few people a day I hope my evil little site does...

[rustybrick]

Black Hat SEO directory. lol

[sanity]

Excellent post Ron!

[projectphp]

To my philosophy, the SEO who refuses to properly inform their clients of all available techniques and the costs risks and benefits is not ethical...It is the clients role to make the choice,

Hmmm. I agree for the most part, but with a lot of caveats.

The suggestions that an SEO gives must meet a clients needs, not just be possible options. For example, a client that wants long term to have their current domain indexed in search engines is better off avoiding anything that is known to have risk. A large brand, with a hostile anti group (say Microsoft) has considerations that preclude the offerring of certain advice as well, especially anyhting that may increase the hostility.

The role of any professional is to understand a clients needs and offer them recomendations that fit those needs, not to necessarily offer them every perceivable option.

[tosheroon]

Ammon gave an example earlier of a couple of insurance related sites that used hidden text and interlinked domains, I'd be extremely interested in an update to tell us when those sites are removed from the index or dropped down a hundred places, because what I'm seeing is that a wide variety of questionable tactics are so widely used now that a search engine can't remove them all without seriously hindering their push to have the largest index. The time it takes for human review often prohibits the removal or demotion of sites directly, though presumably the information goes towards the building of the next algo.

Redirection and cloaking are just the most obvious, I'm sure we all see sites above us in the rankings that use some of the following techniques:

sites that use php or similar to create several thousand pages from material that would fill only a hundred regular html pages - tripadvisor for instance

sites where the 500 words at the bottom of the page are they're purely for seo purposes and only what's above the fold is aimed at the visitor, the text may be hidden using css or old fashioned tables and background images, or it may be simply laid out in a boring style so that the visitor quickly clicks away to the relevant attractive usable links in the top half.

sites with loads of popups for definitions of words, or product descriptions where you close the pop up after use but there is a small link at the bottom of the popup pushing fractions of page rank back to the home page.

information sites on medical problems or travel destinations that despite being hosted on different servers ultimately feed links back to the same commercial pages, or sites that buy thousands of plain text advertising links on every page of huge academic or professional directories.

I don't have an opinion on the rights and wrongs of using them, in fact I think its silly to use moral terms to describe seo techniques in a world with so many real moral issues.

These techniques are very hard for webmasters to learn and test when they're starting out because they don't have access to hundreds of disposable domains to experiment on.

But don't just turn a blind eye to them and feel safe in the world of search engine friendly pages that adhere to other peoples guidelines, don't use your dislike of the tactics as an excuse for laziness. Whether or not you intend to use the techniques you would be well advised to learn them!

[Ruud]

They cannot, for all practical purposes, drop them - but they could rank them lower. Problem would start once you hit the larger corporate sites. Can you rank them lower than the other engines do? It would take a concerted effort from all SE players to really force them to change their behaviour.

Ruud

[ferret77]

The hat stuff is garbage, I think it is similar to a best practice or ethical label...just a bunch of bogus marketing speak to say \"I am better than you.\"  

That is so true, the whole thing is just a marketing scheme

its a computer algo there is nothing ethical about it

I mean how much of that hat stuff really does anything anyway

[projectphp]

That is so true, the whole thing is just a marketing scheme  
its a computer algo there is nothing ethical about it

So much of business is ethics. Examples: Cigarette advertising, right or wrong? Shell's suppossed involvment in less than savouring dealings on the West Coast of Africa. B&T allegedly supporting the smuggling of Tabaco into SE Asian countries. Heck, right back to the war that started between China and England over the Opium trade (The English were the original drug lords).

These were all business decisions, but are they ethical? Where does one draw the line? I am sure some company execs believe it is ethical to do almost everything to increase profit for the company. I am sure the English thought running Opium into a country in which 8/10 people were adicted and whose supply the emporer and leaders where trying deperately to curb was fine. Not sure that I agree.

I am not promoting answers here, just questions. If you don't have ethics in business then you wont last long. By ethics I mean the true definition, "A set of principles of right conduct", (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=ethics&r=67), not something absolute that a third party decides.

The question is how does ethics interplay with SEO? Are techniques unethical, is it there implementation or is ethics all about the client? Ammon defined ethical behaviour as supplying all available information to clients. As we in Australia have come to know this through our Intelligence agencies failures, a "Frank and fearless" informing about all options. Others see Ethical behaviour as shepparding clients towards approved Search Engine approved SEO methodologies. Each opinion is valid as has merit. Each is a a defining ethical outlook.

These are all questions that we have to answer for ourselves, there is no right or wrong. Ethics are all around us, every day in every situation you are redefining and reapplying your ethical beliefs and views. Business and SEO are no different.

Even though "...just a marketing scheme", the breadth of responsibility that every endeavour naturally embues is equally relevant to Internet marketting, and even more so in regards to how you run your business.

[Ruud]

I realize that "ethics", "black hat", "grey hat" confuse the discussion a bit. They are up to a point very subjective indeed.

Let me be honest, when I think of "black hat" (or any other label one can put on it) I think of precisely those things no-one here is seen to readily advice to someone. I haven't come across a lot of posts that promote cloaking as an efficient way to push Flash based pages into the rankings.

What I did read between the lines in this thread is that there might be valid reasons to use a technique such as cloaking. That it depends on how you use it and for what. I also saw mentioned that you have to weigh the risk. This I previously thought to be higher than I do now.

Ruud

[projectphp]

What I did read between the lines in this thread is that there might be valid reasons to use a technique such as cloaking.

Not sure that is teh right "between the lines" reading. A more accurate summary would be:
The use of a technique is neither good, bad, right or wrong. understand the risks, but realise there are risks. sometimes the risk is less traffic, other times a potential ban.

That it depends on how you use it and for what. I also saw mentioned that you have to weigh the risk. This I previously thought to be higher than I do now.

The important thing to understand is that risk is a constant in business. My country was foundered with people that stole loaves of bread because they were hungry. Stealing may be wrong, but dying is a whole lot worse. understand the risk, weigh up your interest level and care factor, and go from there.

[ferret77]

I don't think there any ethical or unethical techniques

there are just techniques,

I think the only unethical seo is someone who misleads a client

or makes promises he/she cannot deliever

it seems some "ethical" seos spend more time calling people names then anything else

[rcjordan]

From what I understand there are places where they do talk without the need to have discussions on how ethical something is or not. How much they share of their knowledge - I don't know.

Yes, but they are now often private, invitation-only forums or IM exchanges. Personally, I like the meetings/events like the one coming up in Vegas.

[Ransak]

[quote]I don't think there any ethical or unethical techniques

there are just techniques.[/quote]


What do you think about misleading SEO techniques such as Porn sites, optimizing as to draw traffic from searches on U.S. Governenment, the Whitehouse, Disney, or other non-porn related topics? Valid technique or unethical behavoir?

This goes for any site really, just porn is a very polarizing topic so I figured I'd use the extreme case as an illustration.

Frank Vollono[/quote]

[ferret77]

I would say misrepersenting the a website

or basically lying about its subject matter would be unethical advertising

regardless if its on the web or in print or tv

Me personally , if some said they wanted to do something like that

I would mosty likely say its dumb idea, it probablably won't make any moeny, you are going to p*** people off , there will be hate mail, possibly lawyer letters etc

it a terrible marketing idea

if they insited on thats what they want do ....

then i would take the money and do it... just like I would design a site for any paying customer except kiddie porn

I don't care if the site is naked woman selling H****r cigerettes but hey thats just me

[Mike521]

well for something like porn, I think they would make money. sure most people looking for disney aren't looking for porn, but if a naked chick pops up, there's lots and lots of people who are gonna click on that picture and want to see more

[ferret77]

there has to be negative backlash that would make it unprofitable

thats unethical advertising it not really about the seo

seo just makes the site rank,

if some made an ad that was a lie , is the graphic designer unethical

[Mike521]

well.. whitehouse.com is still up and running

I'm no expert on this stuff though, just taking guesses really. I agree that there are definitely a lot of people who would hate it

[Black_Knight]

Ah, if you really want to debate ethics in SEO, why not try one of the classic threads (each among the top-ten all-time Cre8asite discussions in terms of replies and page views):

Does SEO=SPAM? - 168 posts, 7091 views
Google being unscrupulous? - 162 posts, 9857 views
Search engine stances on SEO, plus Google, and SearchKing - 279 posts, 5628 views
SearchKing vs. Google - latest - 222 posts, 7914 views

[Ransak]

I don't care if the site is naked woman selling H****r cigerettes but hey thats just me.

LOL - Great visual, thanks ferret77 for the smile.


Frank Vollono

[rustybrick]

I am shaking from reading Does SEO = SPAM.

So much history in only 1.5 years.