The Twin Worlds Of SEO: Black And White Hat Tactics
Internet marketing is split between two poles: white hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat SEO concerns those of us who abide by the rules and undertake good SEO practice as recommended by search engines such as Google. Black hat SEO is a darker world, where strategists develop (often irritating) methods to gain traffic to certain sites that have no relevancy to the end users search query.
In order to conduct good SEO practice you must present the content on your website in a manner that is as user friendly as possible with the only aims being to inform end users in relation to their original query and driving traffic to the website. Black hat SEO is concerned with tricking users and search engine spiders alike to enter a certain website, where it is very unlikely the end users original query will be answered and may in fact lead to malware or other malicious programs being installed on the user’s computer.
Among black hat SEO tactics two of the most popular methods are Spamdexing and Cloaking. Spamdexing is primarily used to trick the search engine spiders into thinking a particular website is highly relevant to an end users search query by making the content and page tags as keyword rich as possible. Similar keywords will often be repeated in the content and in the meta tags and descriptions of a web page meaning that when a search engine spider crawls a page – those keywords stand out which makes the spider believe the page is highly relevant and therefore pushes up to the top of the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page).
Spamdexing isn’t limited to these techniques though as link spamming also exists whereby links are exchanged between websites with the sole intent to gain more traffic to that particular website. This method may become void though in the near future as Google are planning on changing part of the algorithm that they use to evaluate websites in order to detect if a particular website is undertaking some form of link spamming.
Cloaking is another form of black hat tactics that are used widespread over the internet. Cloaking involves presenting different content to search engine spiders than what end users are presented with. This involves keyword spamming a webpage and placing a JavaScript redirect so when a user lands on a particular page with the relevant keywords linked to their query, they are then redirected to a page which is less relevant and different from the original page that they landed on.
If you are unsure as to whether your SEO tactics are white or black hat then it is worthwhile taking the time to look at Google’s webmaster guidelines that can provide you with a set of regulations on what you should be doing SEO wise.
Latitude is one of the largest and longest-established digital marketing agencies in the UK, with expertise in SEO, PPC, display advertising, social media, conversion analytics and affiliate marketing. Original article is here.
