Should I Use Black Hat or White Hat SEO Techniques?
Black Hat, White Hat and Big G
By Peter Adamson (c) 2009
I read a lot of articles and postings regarding Internet
marketing, SEO and the like. One frequently recurring theme is
the distinction between black hat, grey hat and white hat
methods. Interlaced with the use and abuse of these terms is the
notion of what is “ethical” and what is not. It seems to be
generally assumed that anything black hat is somehow unethical.
More disconcerting yet, anything that Google frowns upon is
often deemed unethical as well. I would like to clear the air
about these terms which seem to mean all things to all men.
First of all, let’s put to one side for a moment the recently
coined terms which euphemistically refer to SEO techniques under
hats of various colors. These are not dictionary terms, and
anyone can make them mean whatever they want. However, the words
“ethical” and “unethical” have very strict meanings, have
had for generations and their misuse can call into question the
personal integrity of individuals. So what does ethical mean
anyway? According to dictionary.com (http://dictionary.com/):
1. pertaining to or dealing with morals or the principles of
morality; pertaining to right and wrong in conduct.
2. being in accordance with the rules or standards for right
conduct or practice, esp. the standards of a profession: It was
not considered ethical for physicians to advertise.
So doing something unethical is first and foremost immoral and
wrong. Additionally, it may be implicitly wrong because it
violates an accepted code of conduct adopted by a recognized
professional body, whose moral judgement is above reproach.
Given these definitions, when would Internet marketing cross the
line into the realm of the unethical? Well, let’s try to ring
fence the concept and limit it to what we think may be just
plain wrong by any reasonable standard of measure:
- lying to people to get them to buy your product
- offering a product that does not meet the expectations created
by your marketing material (variation on lying)
- deliberately abusing a resource to the detriment of its owners
or of the other users
- deliberately devising strategies to deprive affiliates of
their fair share of profits after they have expended money
and effort to sell your product
- fraudulently generating affiliate or other revenues
I am not suggesting that this list is exhaustive. The point I am
trying to make is that something is truly unethical if it
promotes falsehood, if it is to the detriment of someone or if
it involves fraud. So the sixty-four dollar question is: when is
SEO unethical, when is it black hat, and are the two the same
thing?
The term black hat usually refers to SEO tactics that are
designed to trick the search engines into ranking a page that
they wouldn’t otherwise rank. Let’s apply this to the present
question.
Suppose by some top secret powerful method you could trick
Google into ranking your porn site for the term “clip art”. I
think we would all agree that this would be unethical. Your
content is potentially damaging to people, especially minors. It
has absolutely nothing to do with what people are looking for
when it comes up in the SERPs. It further harms Google’s
reputation for providing relevant results, so it would be
detrimental to the owners of an online resource.
Now, suppose that by some top secret powerful method you could
trick Google into ranking your clip art site for the term “clip
art”. The method is definitely black hat, because it attempts
to circumvent the search engine’s algorithm. If Google really
knew what was up, it would not rank the site. But you did not
abuse Google’s resources, or overload their servers. You are
not acting to the detriment of people searching your term
because you have what they want. Quite to the contrary, the
SERPs for the term “clip art” are polluted with absolutely
valueless sites. You would in fact be doing everyone a big
favor, Google included. But, you have done something that Google
said not to do. You did “black hat” SEO.
Now it is increasingly clear that Google is beginning to believe
its destiny on earth is to police the Internet and tell us all
what we should and should not do. It is not the first nor will
it be the last corporation to have delusions of moral
superiority. But when I read articles that imply, if they do not
state outright, that an SEO technique is unethical because
Google said not to do it, I become concerned. This is what
totalitarianism is made of: the masses cowing to bullies who
invoke some self-serving principle to justify their moral high
ground. It may be in order to ask whether Google itself would
stoop to unethical or black hat practices. Consider just two
examples of Google’s questionable behavior:
- Anyone who has had their AdSense terminated with no
explanation whatever knows that Google keeps the unpaid balance
of funds in the AdSense account. They claim they keep it to
refund the money to the advertisers, but do they? Just try
to find an advertiser who has been victim of click fraud, and
has received a refund from Google. You may be looking a long
time…
- Google uses a black hat technique known as cross-domain
cookies. First let me say that cross-domain cookies are legit
when needed to run a tightly integrated set of domains. For
example, if your secure online store is on a domain owned by
your hosting provider, you would be justified in using
cross-domain cookies to carry user preferences from one domain
to the other during checkout. But this is not the case when you
visit any Google owned site (Blogger, YouTube…) and Google
tracks you. If you log into your blogger.com
(http://blogger.com/) account, then your AdSense account,
Google’s all-watching eye knows you are one and the same person.
Yet the two sites are entirely unrelated. This is violation of
privacy.
The point I am making is that of all the companies out there,
Google is not particularly qualified to lecture on right and
wrong. Just how badly we have run amok on this point can be seen
in this extract from an article posted on about.com
(http://about.com/):
“Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as
techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an
unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include
one or more of the following characteristics:
* breaks search engine rules and regulations
* creates a poor user experience directly because of the
black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site
* unethically presents content in a different visual or
non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine
users.”
If you do not find this appalling, then we need to have a talk.
According to this piece, it is unethical (morally wrong) to
break search engine rules and regulations! Since when does any
search engine have any right whatsoever over what I do with my
web site, my shoes, my car, whatever? Creating a poor user
experience is unethical? Hello??? As for their third point, we
have already dealt with it. Cloaking is not unethical in itself.
It is what you do with it that may be unethical. You may have to
cloak because some crawler is so clueless that cloaking is the
only way you can get people to find your site when they are
looking for what you’ve got.
Here is another of my favorites, taken from Google’s Webmaster
Guidelines:
“If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality
guidelines, please report that site…”
Abusing? It would be fine to refer to sites as not adhering to
their guidelines, because adhering is something we do
voluntarily. Anyone is free to adhere or to not adhere to
Google’s quality guidelines. But to refer to non-adhesion as
abusing? If I tell everyone to wear a red shirt, and someone
wears a blue one, are they abusing my guidelines? We are on a
very slippery slope here. The underlying assumption is that if
you disobey Google, you are doing something wrong. For Google to
take this stance is bad enough. That it is widely accepted by
webmasters everywhere is serious cause for alarm.
OK, we have attempted to defined ethical and unethical. Now
let’s try to answer the key question as to whether black hat is
unethical. I suggest that SEO is black hat when it uses specific
techniques in order to get a search engine to behave in a way
that is not what its owners/designers intended. In other words,
it tricks the search engines. So when is it unethical? It is
unethical when it is detrimental to the owners of a resource it
uses/abuses (in general, spam), or when it promotes falsehood. I
would include fraud in the list if I could think of a way to use
SEO fraudulently, but I can’t. (Cookie stuffing and CPA
cloaking are both black hat and fraud, but unrelated to SEO).
You may argue that if I intentionally trick a search engine I am
acting to its detriment by definition, and therefore to the
detriment of its owners. I would respectfully disagree, and
refer to the previous discussion on cloaking.
Black Hat SEO is clearly unethical when it abuses resources.
It is common to automate the creation of social media accounts,
create hundreds or thousands of sites and spam them with links.
To camouflage the operation additional thousands upon thousands
of bogus entries are scraped from RSS feeds. First, this usually
violates the terms of service which would prohibit opening large
numbers of accounts. Further, it pollutes the sites with
rubbish. Finally it is detrimental to the owners of the site by
wasting storage space and bandwidth. Does this mean that
automating posting to social sites is unethical? Only if it
abuses resources, violates terms of service or is harmful to
people. A user agent is a user agent, whether it is called
Firefox, googlebot or libwww. It’s what you do with the
automation that may be unethical.
All of our SEO efforts should be done in good conscience to the
benefit of our clients and to the larger community, not to
appease a bully. Google’s hegemony is cause for serious concern
among many informed people. Black hatting, or resisting tyranny?
You decide.
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Peter Adamson is a marketing geek, and creator of The Link
Juicer, an online tool that is used to ‘get backlinks’
(http://www.thelinkjuicer.com/) and designed to produce long-term
results through natural organic search traffic.
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