I hate webspam. I hate what it's done to the reputation of hardworking, honest, smart web marketers who help websites earn search traffic. I hate how it's poisoned the acronym SEO; a title I'm proud to wear. I hate that it makes legitimate marketing tactics less fruitful. And I hate, perhaps most of all, when it works.
Here's a search for "buy propecia," which is a drug I actually take to help prevent hair loss (My wife doesn't think I'd look very good sans hair):
Like most search results in the pharma sphere, it's polluted by pages that have artificially inflated their rankings. This is obvious to virtually everyone who's even partially tech-savvy and it does three terrible things:
- Marketers and technologists who observe results like this equate SEO with spamming. If you've read a Hacker News or StackOverflow thread on the topic, you've undoubtedly seen this perspective.
- SEOs new to the profession see this and think that whatever these sites are doing is an effective way to earn rankings, and try repeating their tactics (often harming their sites or those of employers/clients in the process).
- Consumers learn not to trust the search results from Google, killing business value for everyone in the web world, e.g. this post on Why You Should Never Search for Free Wordpress Themes in Google
Spam removes economic and brand value from the search/social/web marketing ecosystem. If you create this kind of junk, at least be honest with yourself - you're directly harming your fellow marketers, online businesses, searchers and future generations of web users.
Last week, Kris Roadruck wrote a post called "Whitehat SEO is a Joke." He was upfront about the fact that it was intentionally provocative, not entirely truthful and more sensational than authentic. Despite these caveats, I think a response and some clarification about my thoughts on black hat in general are in order. I'm responding less because I think Kris believes it and more because of the surprisingly supportive response his post received in parts of the search community.
Some Points on Kris' Post:
Kris begins his article with a personal realization:
"... I started realizing there were only really 2 kinds of white-hats. The ones complaining about how they were doing everything by the book and getting their asses handed to them by “unethical tactics”, and the ones that were claiming success that didn’t belong to them... because they... happened to be in a niche that bloggers find interesting or entertaining..."
"It’s easy to preach great content when you have a great subject. But no one gives a shit about non-clog toilets or pulse oximeters or single phase diode bridge rectifiers. Sure you might be able to piece together 1 or 2 bits of link-bait but you can be sure that you aren’t going to get the anchor text that you want."
Kris' premise seems compelling and even has elements of truth (great content does work better in fields where there's more interest from web-savvy site owners), but on the whole, it's a lie. That lie - that "great content" doesn't work in boring niches - is one told out of laziness, jealousy and contempt. It's told by spammers to other spammers because it glosses over the fact that white-hat, legitimate marketing can work well in ANY field, for any site.
How about some examples, you ask? Happy to:
- Here's Ready for Zero. It's a Y-Combinator backed startup tackling the horrifically spammy and, worse-than-boring, field of credit card debt relief. They don't rank yet (as they've just launched), but if they invest in SEO, they will. They have content - in this case a great team, great story, great investors and the right product - to earn all the links they'll need. If I were an SEO consultant for a company seeking rankings for debt relief type searches, that's exactly the "great content" I'd recommend.
- Here's one that does rank - Oyster Hotel Reviews. Today, they're on the first page for nearly every hotel they've covered, and in position 5 for the massively competitive phrase "hotel reviews" (and they're the best result in the SERPs).
- Another that ranks - Pods Moving Company. It's not the most exciting site in the world, but it's a good idea with good marketing and it's on the first page for "moving company," another incredibly competitive result. And guess what? No links from bloggers, either (nor any black/gray hat links I could find).
- Speaking of not exciting but white hat and "great content," here's Ron Hazelton's DIY Home Improvement. A mini-celebrity thanks to a home repair-focused TV show, his site isn't exactly drawing in the Linkerati, but he markets it well and his stuff is good, so when you do searches like 'toilet replacement' Ron's site is #1.
- Slightly less boring, but more competitive and equally un-blogger friendly is the world of business invoicing and bill paying. Yet, the gang at Freshbooks is kicking butt and taking page 1 rankings all over the place.
- Sound effects are another unlikely arena for building a big SEO success story, but despite avoiding every black hat tactic leveraged by the typical ringtone spammers, Seattle-based Hark.com has kicked serious butt here. They generate millions of visits from more than 750K keyword phrases each month, and they've built a serious brand in an industry rife with manipulation.
- Kris specifically called out bridge rectifiers as being an impossibly boring industry, yet here's AllAboutCircuits, who shows up on page one for virtually every diode-related search. There's nothing fancy there, either - it's just great content, like this one on rectifier circuits. The illustrations are detailed, the content is awesome and they follow an almost-Wikipedia-like model to get contributors, many of whom link back.
I try hard, in my writing, my presentations and my professional contributions to this industry to be warm, generous and understanding. But, black hats telling the world that they turned their back on white hat because it's impossible is a load of crap, and I'm not feeling very empathetic toward that viewpoint.
Yes, white hat SEO, particularly in boring industries for non-established sites is a tremendous challenge. It requires immense creativity, huge quantities of elbow grease and a lot of patience, too. Black hat takes some creativity sometimes, but often it's about finding or learning the tactic Google + Bing haven't caught up to and applying it over and over until it burns down your site and you have to find another. Black hat is fundamentally interesting and often amazingly entertaining, much in the same vein as movies and TV shows featuring clever bank robbers. But a statement like this has no legs to stand on:
"... the longer I practiced and studied greyhat, the more annoyed I got with the piss poor advice and absolute falsehoods I saw being doled out by so called SEO experts to newbie’s who had no way of knowing that the advice they were soaking up was going to keep them at the back of the search engine results pages (serps) for the foreseeable future. Whitehat isn’t just a bit slower. It’s wishful thinking. It’s fucking irresponsible."
Thankfully, it's easy to refute Kris' points with hard, substantive examples (something his post doesn't do at all).
Job searches are among the most challenging, competitive results in the SERPs. Back in 2008 (when we still had a consulting practice), we worked with the crew at Simply Hired to set up a long term strategy to win. It involved a syndication strategy with smart linking and anchor text, embeddable widgets, a search-friendly, crawlable site, a data-rich blog and a massive online brand building campaign, too. After 6 months, Simply Hired had improved rankings and traffic, but they certainly weren't #1 across the board. Today, however, I'm incredibly proud of their progress and I continue to stay in touch with their team and help out informally when/where I can. They're on page 1 for "job search," they rank for hundreds of thousands of job title + geo combinations and thanks to SEO (and dozens of other successful marketing + sales programs) they're poised to be industry leaders in a massive market.
These strategies that worked for Simply Hired (and worked for other former SEOmoz clients like Yelp, Etsy and Zillow) aren't some dark secret, either. I wrote a lengthy blog post explaining the process in depth in a post called Ranking for Keyword + Cityname in Multiple Geographies. And I'm not alone, blogs like those from SearchEngineLand, SEOBook, Distilled and all of these others give tremendously valuable advice day after day.
I think Kris owes us some examples of "piss poor advice and absolute falsehoods" being "doled out by so called SEO experts." I'll agree that there's some bad advice floating around the SEO world, and I'll even admit to giving some myself (remember when I thought XML Sitemaps were a bad idea?), but that's a bold statement to make without any evidence.
Unfortunately, this next statement can't be written off so easily:
"If you are charging your clients for service and not being competitive then you are ripping off your clients. It’s as simple as that. I know you whitehats are squirming in your seat right now shaking your little fists and saying, “It’s not sustainable. Our strategy is based around long term results!”. No, it’s not. Your strategy is based around wishful thinking and hoping that someday Google will do your job for you so you don’t have to. Until Google starts enforcing the rules, there aren’t any. And as long as that is true anyone who is not waiting around for them to be enforced is going to rank. Anyone who does wait around won’t. You have an obligation to your clients to do everything in your power to rank their sites using the most effective methods currently available to you."
He's dead wrong on the false choice between either being black hat or "not using the most effective methods." A tax advisor that recommends quasi-legal, high-risk shelters might be using "the most effective methods," to protect wealth, but that doesn't make his more responsible peers obligation-dodging sissies. Search marketers, whether in-house or consultant DO have an obligation, in my opinion, to know and understand the full spectrum of tactics, white hat or black, but we also carry the same responsibility as any other professional with specialized knowledge: to recommend the right strategy for the situation.
Unless your manager/company/client is wholly comfortable with the high, variable risk that comes with black hat SEO, you'd better stay clear. I'm also of the mind that there's almost nothing black hat can accomplish that white hat can't do better over the long run, while building far more value. Unless it's "I want to rank in the top 5 for 'buy viagra' in the next 7 days," you'd better explain that you're recommending black hat primarily because you're not smart, talented and creative enough to find a white hat strategy to do it.
But, Kris makes a fair point with regards to Google (and Bing as well). The engines are not doing enough to stop spam + manipulation from black hat tactics. And, for as long as they fail on this front, there will be those seduced by Kris' viewpoint (Kris himself used to be quite white hat). To be fair, they've done a good job on several fronts recently - pushing down low quality content farms in the Panda/Farmer update, making original content rank better, and putting more high quality brands in the SERPs (even if they're not doing perfect SEO).
The biggest problem currently (IMO) are manipulative, black hat links through paid sources, automated link drops, reciprocal spam, article "spinning" (possibly my least favorite tactic on the rise), low quality directories, link "rings," etc. There's not a lot of truly new types of black hat link manipulation, but the old ones are, tragically, working again in a lot of niches. I hope that's next on Google's + Bing's radars. If it is, a lot of black hats are going to have some painful times, but I think that's the only way to solve the problems webspam creates. One of my favorite parts of being a white hat is cheering for the search quality teams rather than against them, and getting that little bump in traffic every time they improve the quality of their algorithms.
Black Hat ≠ SEO
The last point of Kris' I'll tackle revolves around the jobs an SEO performs:
"If your main offering is quality content – YOU ARE NOT AN SEO, You are a writer. If you are billing your client SEO prices for writing services you are ripping them off. If you didn’t go to college for or otherwise study writing and literature and you are offering writing services to your client rather than advising them to hire someone who actually specializes and is trained in writing, you are ripping them off.
With the exception of very large sites, most onsite optimization opportunities can be identified and charted in an audit in a matter of a few days. Implementation in most cases won’t take very long either and doesn’t even really need to be conducted by an SEO if the audit is written up properly. What does that leave; content strategy and off-site SEO. The content strategy is just that… a STRATEGY, which can be handed off to a competent writer. If you are still charging your client after this point and you aren’t competing with all the tools available and you aren’t advising them of someone else who could or would, then you are doing your client a disservice."
These are ludicrous statements, but I think Kris realizes it and is simply using them to generate controversy. Anyone who honestly believes that the extent of an SEO's job is to develop content strategies, audit for on-page SEO and build links has never done the job professionally.
I wrote a blog post back in 2007 highlighting why SEO is so hard. In it, I talked about the massive quantity of things that affect SEO and that number has only grown. Today, a responsible SEO needs to be thinking about:
- The business' overall product, marketing and sales strategy and where SEO makes the most sense.
- Keyword research + targeting (a process that requires tools, patience, intuition, testing and experience)
- Funnel optimization (CRO has both direct and indirect SEO impacts these days)
- Testing + optimizing content for users (time on site, bounce rate, engagement, etc. all matter directly + indirectly, too)
- Content strategy (which ties into overall business strategy at the highest levels)
- On-page optimization (black hats were actually some of the earliest to notice that Google's gotten so much smarter about on-page analysis than just keyword use and repetition, so I'm sure Kris knows how in-depth this process can be)
- Making the site search-engine friendly (a complex project even on many simple sites as features like faceted navigation, AJAX crawling, different treatment of Javascript/Flash and many, many more now exist)
- XML Sitemaps (we recently gave a 90 minute webinar on this topic that generated dozens of questions; it's no fire-and-forget tactic)
- Analytics - visitor monitoring is just the start, there's webmaster tools, link monitoring, brand/mention alerts, social media tracking and more
- Alternative search listings (local/maps/places, video, images, news, blogs, shopping, etc. Just one of these can be a full-time job.)
- Usability + user experience issues (since these can have a huge indirect and possibly direct impact on rankings)
- Reputation tracking + management
- Competitive research
- Social media marketing (FB shares are the most highly correlated metric we found to Google's rankings. No SEO can afford to ignore social today, and that's a massive strategic and tactical undertaking)
- Syndication, scraping, copyright and duplicate content issues
And hundreds of others.
If Kris thinks pounding links at a page until it ranks is the majority of his SEO responsibilities, I'm worried (Note: I don't actually believe that; I've met Kris and he's a very smart guy. Instead, I suspect significant hyperbole went into his writing). If anyone out there tells you this is how they're going to do SEO, you'd better make sure they're either a highly specialized contractor or find another provider who can help think holistically about all of the above.
Why We Can't Ignore Black Hat Entirely
Last week, I was in Munich keynoting SMX and spent some time with a retiring black hat, Bob Rains (who's moving to the White Hat world and joining TandlerDoerje in Germany). Bob and I were on a panel discussing some black hat social media tactics. In particular, Bob mentioned a tactic wherein he'd build Twitter + Facebook profiles for racehorses that would garner thousands of followers by making the profiles seem "more real than real" and even pretending to be "official" Twitter accounts for the horses. On gameday, he could then tweet/share a link to his gambling site to place bets on the horses, netting him big affiliate payouts.
_
Marcus Tandler, Mikkel deMib, Johannes Beus, Bob Rains and Rand at SMX Munich
(Note: You can
listen to the full panel, a mix of German + English, here)
To do this manipulative work, though, Bob had to work incredibly hard to have real conversations on these social sites, upload photos from events, tweet interesting stats and experiences that could be verified. In other words... He's building great content!
My recommendation was simple - just call the account a "fan page" and suddenly, you're 100% white hat. You're building a great social profile; why not make it something Twitter/Facebook won't shut down if they get word of it from the real owners? Why not go one extra step, remove the "official" title and BE white hat! Yes, you might have a slightly harder time building up the profiles, but they'll last forever! You can sleep at night!
I highlight this story because it perfectly illustrates how close black and white hat marketing often are. It also shows why I love talking to black hats and learning from them. There's almost always a way to take the knowledge and experiences from black hats (the best of whom, like Bob, are often massively creative) and apply it in white hat ways.
Three weeks prior, in London and then New Orleans, Distilled hosted a one-day intensive seminar on link building. One of the talks at each event was called "Lessons from the Dark Side: What White Hats can Learn from Black Hat SEO." Two presenters, Martin Macdonald (in London) and Kris Roadruck (in NOLA), gave talks about their experiences with webspam's effectiveness, limitations and takeaways. I thought both presentations were excellent - they clearly indicated the danger of black hat SEO (Kris' deck started with almost a dozen slides about how + why not to do what he showed), but didn't pull any punches in showing the ups and downs of a spammer's life.
SEOs have a responsibility to understand and appreciate how and why black hat SEO operates. It's certainly not the first or most important step in an SEO education, but it's part of being a true professional. No one who does IT consulting would neglect to understand hacking + malicious attacks. No one who does public relations avoids studying the manipulative parts of their field. Even in industries like construction and contracting, it pays to understand how, why and when shoddy work and cut corners happen. So too must professional, white hat SEOs know the range of tactics at play in our field.
A few months back, I answered a related question on Quora:
Knowing more about each of those practices listed can make you a better SEO. I'm not someone who pretends to have great expertise in this field, but every time I hear a black hat share a successful tactic (that isn't illegal or just drive-by spam), I learn something and am often able to come up with a way to leverage the same effect in a white hat way.
Why White Hat is Always Better
There's very few things in the world that I perceive as wholly black + white. Spamming the search engines vs. authentic, organic marketing, however, is one of them.
It's my opinion that for real brands and real businesses, the choice of going 100% white hat will pay massive dividends every time. Here's why:
- There's always a better way to spend that time + money. Spam isn't free or easy, despite the image some black hats portray. When I hear about the actual costs and time commitments black hats invest, I'm blown away. For not much more time, and often less money, those same businesses and sites could invest in long-term, high value white hat tactics. Many just lack the creativity and willingness to do the hard work, others are seduced by the quick win or ignorant of the options available to them.
- White hat builds exciting companies, spam doesn't. With a very small number of exceptions, spam doesn't build exciting, scalable, long-term companies. It creates relatively small amounts of temporary wealth. If you're unwilling to trade short term gains for long term success, you're probably hurting the online ecosystem - none of us should endorse that behavior.
- White hat rankings can be shared. That means never having to sweat hiding dirty secrets, protecting your tactics or link sources, jumping through hoops to keep your footprint anonymous or refraining from showing off your site. The benefits of transparency improve your ability to do PR, branding, networking and all of those, in turn, help SEO.
- Spam always carries risk. Whether it's tomorrow, next month or 3 years from now before you're knocked out of the search engines, it will happen. You can invest in multiple sites and tactics, shore up defenses and build anonymity to hide your online profile, but honestly, if you applied that creativity and effort to white hat.... Just saying.
- You're renting rankings rather than buying them. Devaluation of spam tactics means you have to stay one step ahead of the engines, and can never spend a week free from sweating what will and won't be found. White hat may take longer, but, if done right, it can build an unassailable position of strength long term.
- Reliability in the spam world sucks. The people who sell spammy links or offer spam services are nearly always fly-by-night operations, moving from one business model to the next. Spammers are almost never long-term operators.
- Any victory is a hollow one. I don't just mean in a touchy-feely way, I mean that no matter how many times you rank well with spam or how much you make, it's just money (and often far too little to sustain you, meaning you've got to go do more tomorrow). You're not building something real, long-lasting and sustainable and you're rarely fulfilling any of the other requirements for job satisfaction or happiness.
- The money's not that good. Ask yourself who the most prolific, talented, high profile spammers are in the world. I can name a good dozen or so and none of them are retired, only a few are millionaires and not a one, to my knowledge, has done 8 figures (excluding a few truly dark hatted individuals who've earned their money from porn empires or illegal activities).
- There is legal danger. I hesitate to bring this up because some folks in the search sphere have over-emphasized this danger. However, the FTC, the British government and the EU all have regulations about disclosure of interests, and a lot of link buying and link spamming behavior violates these guidelines. We've yet to see serious enforcement, but personally, I have no tolerance for risk of this kind, and I suspect many others don't either.
- Spam never builds value in multiple channels. What I love about the inbound/organic marketing philosophy is how it builds a site that attracts authentic traffic from hundreds of sources, often without any additional work. Spamming your way to a #1 ranking might send search traffic, but if the web shifts to Facebook/Twitter or if email marketing becomes the biggest tactic in your niche, or if a competitor wins purely on branding and branded search, you're up a creek. You've built nothing of real value - nothing to make people come back and share and like, +1, tweet, link, email, stumble, vote for, shout to the heavens about. Spam builds a shell of a marketing strategy; one crack and it's all over.
The graphics below were in a slide presentation I made, but they're worth repeating here:
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Who ranks #1 for "online dating?" It's not a black hat, but a site that found a genius way to become a content and media hub, OKCupid. How about "buy shoes online," one of the top converting terms in the apparel industry. It's Zappos, a brand that's put customer service, great product and a unique business model part of their SEO (big props to Adam Audette, who's made them a shining star in the SEO e-commerce world). Or "real estate values," an incredibly competitive term that's only risen in popularity with the market crisis? It's Zillow. Or "travel blog site," where some brilliant viral marketing earned Travelpod the top position. Or "art prints," where Benchmark-backed Art.com outranks even the exact match domain.
I could go on and on and on. The sites that people WANT to click on in the results. The ones that make searchers, technologists, marketers and search quality engineers happy are sites that deserve to rank. When you build a brand that does that and optimize in a way that no webspam engineer would ever want to discount, you've built a true competitive advantage in SEO. Black hat is, much of the time, a sad excuse for a lack of creativity, discipline and willingness to invest in the long term.
Here's to hoping the SEO industry continues to grow, flourish and attract brilliant, creative minds. Over the past 9 years of my career in the field, I've seen great progress, but not enough. I can promise that I, SEOmoz and our partners are going to do everything in our power to bring greater legitimacy, value and economic opportunity to the field of search + inbound marketing. It's a fight I look forward to every day.
I'd love to hear from you in the comments about why you're a white hat, and if you do it, what success you've had (and feel free to link to your site).
p.s. I put out a call on Twitter for great white hat sites ranking for competitive phrases and received some terrific responses:
- Online budget app, Budget Simple has a well-designed site and top 3 rankings for "online budget" and "free online budget," competing against the likes of Mint and Intuit.
- Mini Mave in Denmark has legendary SEO Mikkel deMib as a partner and top rankings for competitive terms like "Gravid" (Danish for "pregnant"). Last year, they recorded over a million keywords sending many millions of visits to the site.
- TPMS maker, Orange Electronic has only been around for a few months, but is already ranking for electronic tire pressure monitoring systems and the common acronym TPMS off some great, authentic links from press, media and government sources.
- Science equipment supplier Edmunds has a great site with links that rock and a brand that's trusted throughout the community. Their rankings for hyper-competitive searches like "science equipment" and "scientific supplies" along with a massive long-tail presence show the power of white hat in e-commerce niches.
- Online appliance retailer 8Appliances just started their online marketing, but they've already had success, earning more than 50,000 search visits monthly from top 10 rankings for queries like "miele kitchen appliances" (in Google Australia).
- Mexican-focused travel site JourneyMexico has been having a lots of success in niche search results like "cultural travel mexico" and with their awesome blog.
White hat can be done, even in boring industries or for competitive queries. Anyone who says otherwise isn't telling the truth.
p.p.s This week I'm speaking at SMX Sydney. My first talk (originally Bing vs. Google ranking factors) has changed from the program's listing and will now be on Black Hat / White Hat SEO. If you're in Australia (or nearby), you should definitely attend.
Great title! I'm new, and sometimes I get tempted to do the bad stuff...Posts like this just keep telling me to stay the course and keep doing the right things. Thanks Rand!
3rd month as an seomoz pro member | 6th month as an "in-house" SEO for my SMB.
JDiller, I think it’s great that you reach the right place in such an early era of your SEO career. SEOmoz articles are always helpful and contain a research behind it and I think all mozzers owe a Thanks you to Rand and his team.
Rand have done too many work on this post like previous one. I am learning too many new things from SEOmoz blog without paying single dollar. I really thankful to Rand who write such a great article on SEO. I am still not pro member on SEOmoz due to money problem. But, with help of SEOmoz knowledge...I performed out standing on my projects & thinking to be PRO member. I can pay to SEOmoz with this manner for what I lerned from it.
Rand,
You have to understand that there are relatively few SEO professionals. I've only once or twice looked at a small or medium business's link profile and thought "Holy crap, I wish I had THAT link!"
The white hatters who know what they're talking about, I imagine, are well out of the price range of small to medium businesses. Yet I assert that this is the demographic targeted by most entry-level SEOs. The absent barrier to entry of the industry allows Joe-Shmoe who just heard the phrase "SEO" for the first time last month to take client's money. Unfortunately, that's what white hat is associated with...simply because this "consultation" happens so often
Client: "How do I rank in Google"? SEO: "Make great content" Client: "My content is great, my competitor hasn't updated their site in years" SEO: "It obviously wasn't great enough"
Point me to a company that can get me Smashing Magazine links for under $1,000 a month, and I'm there. Every SEO website I've been to that charges in that price range has a laughable link profile. Hell, most SEO websites have a laughable link profile.
For the past year, I've created unique content on my company blog. It's been linked to many times, because I provide a valuable resource for devs and designers. I guest blogged. I got involved in communities. I tracked SERP changes, or rather, the lack thereof. I kept a journal. I was exhausted with working, school, and blogging to get links. You know what moved me up 50 slots in the SERPs in 2 weeks, after about 8 hours of work? Dofollow blog commenting. I've composed over 80 articles in the past year, with an average of three hours a post. (Some took 10 hours, some took 30 minutes). In 8 hours, I accomplished what 240 hours of frustrating, unpaid hours couldn't do.
Granted, I'm not great at SEO. Then again, neither are most of the people in the industry. I can listen to the community say "Create great content", or I can just do what's quick and dirty and get back to doing what I love, all with virtually the same result.
(P.S...it'd be nice if the comments preserved newlines).
I have to say I agree fully wth this comment. My clients are all small to medium sized businesses with miniscule budgets (the SEO average salary post makes me want to jump off a 10th story building). For these campaigns I've still been able to create at least one excellent blog for my clients each month, distribute it, and generate a few organic links. However, I have seen remarkable results engaging in what would be considered gray hat SEO techniques.
So what is a small business/ small business consultant to do? It's either engage in these techniques, or don't provide the service at all because in the real world most businesses can't afford $1,000 - $5,000 a month for SEO services.
Mine are small medium businesses at times too and I have been able to rank them long-tail to short w minimal investment inlink building (yes gray but not buying) and a lot of time on site and off site in other properties that support their authority IE they get there and stay there - three of my clients w/o putting another dime in 3 years. They do need to do some new things now to get back to #1 over their 10+ kws w the Google Places Shift, but they are till in the top 1-5 for their words. So small businesses actually benefit most I think.
I hear you. Most of my seo writing work is for web designers who serve the small to medium size business and their budgets would never include some of the rates I see for SEOs. Maybe I need to change markets. LOL
But I find that finding the right long tails, geotargeting, and making sure they have good links, good content and better structure is pretty rewarding for all of us overall. Some take the lead quickly, some over a few months but that is also the reward--seeing the climb, but more importantly--getting the phone ringing or people in the door.
Small businesses just want to rank for something. Most of these linking tactics require time and a huge investment in relationship building. They just want to see themselves on Google man. And, I can't scale any of these processes for them.
I completely share your thoughts. I've spent far too many hours writing great content, building unique widgets and pushing out newsworthy press releases which have garnered far fewer links than I'd hoped for. A few comments on do follow blog sites with high page ranks and some directory submissions have taken a fraction of the time and given me huge SERP boosts. I'm not advocating quitting the white hat stuff, but I feel rather like a gold panner who patiently pans the river for a few pieces of dust hoping that one day I'll find a decent nugget. Meantime, some other guy arrives with a ton of TNT and takes down the mountain exposing huge chunks of yellow metal.Here's hoping Google rebuilds the mountain but not before some of that lovely stuff has washed downstream to my pitch!
I didn't comment on Kris' post, because I just didn't want to spend another day wrapped up in SEO controversy, but I have to admit that his post did get me thinking about a few issues. While I absolutely agree that "white-hat" works and that content marketing is an integral part of SEO in 2011, and while I don't agree with the sensationalistic approach to the article, I do think there are a couple of important core points:
(1) We're marketers - our job is to influence people, usually to buy things. While, I firmly believe, as a marketer and a psychologist, that there's a huge difference between persuasion and manipulation, there are also plenty of gray areas. At the end of the day, our goal is often to change the course of people's behavior online, and there are some people who would consider that inherently unethical.
(2) By a strict Google definition, any attempt to manipulate rankings is not "white hat". If you move a keyword to the front of your TITLE tag to rank better, you've gone "grey hat", by a purist's definition. Now, I think that change can be good for SEO, good for search visitors, and win-win, but I also think we have to acknowledge that our industry definition of "white hat" might not match Google's definition or the average consumer's.
(3) Content marketing takes time. I've start thinking more in terms of "short-term" vs. "long-term" SEO. I was talking with Branko Rihtman on Twitter the other day about this, and we were discussing the example of an affiliate who sells iPhone 4 cases. That client doesn't have the luxury of time, and may be more suited to a riskier SEO strategy. While I still believe there are "white hat" options, I agree with Kris' point that it would be irresponsible (as an SEO consultant or agency) not to be open with them about potentially effective tactics.
I should add that I also think it can be ethical to discuss a tactic with a client while refusing to engage in it. I've been honest with clients and then told them "That's not what I do." An ethical SEO sometimes has to treat clients like grown-ups and then make their own decisions about acceptable behavior. Having an honest discussion about tactics and then turning away a client because they want to use tactics you're uncomfortable with is ethical. Doing something you think is wrong to make a buck is unethical.
I attended the Speaker Dinner in New Orleans and this came up in discussion with the Critchlow's. They called me out for using the word "ethics". There are no "ethics" involved. Just Google's rules. The ethical issues are when we lie to our clients or we mislead users so that they think they're clicking on one thing and it actually takes them somewhere else.
The sheer crowd of people surrounded Kris after his talk in New Orleans was an awesome indicator of how eager these SEO's were to skirt the rules and make the most progress for their clients.
Again, it falls to Google, as long as folks can profit, and they can now, doing the grey hat spammy things short term, clients who are in that space are often better served by doing those things. That sucks, but it's true. That is probaby the best point that Kris made, it IS irresponsible not to inform the client of the options, as long as you also share with them the risks.
I'd never support a black hat campaign, but I've been beaten in the past by black hat tactics and when the client looks at us and says "well why did that work?" do we lie to protect "the industry" or do we lay out what happened and why. I can speak from experience that one of the first things that client will do after the meeting is start looking for an SEO consultant more willing to break the rules than I am.
That is the issue. As long as it works, as long as there is money to be made, we will have this argument.
I think the real danger zone is when clients ignore clearly unethical business practices for the allure of short-term gains. We've all seen SEO companies who used risky tactics to move their clients quickly up the rankings, collected a big check, and then ran off before the client crashed and burned 6 months later. That's unethical, regardless of Google's rules. A company that clearly communicates the risks, gives clients a choice and is versed in a wide range of tactics is completely different, IMO.
Unfortunately, the SEO debate is a bit like the healthcare debate. We hate the drug companies and insurance companies, but we want to keep eating cheese fries and Super Big Gulps. We hate spam and don't want it in our inbox, but we want instant results as cheaply as possible and are happy to look the other way for short-term profits. Both the industry and the clients share plenty of blame when it comes to bad SEO.
Pete - you make good points, but I think #2 is a bit ridiculous. Google not only allows, but enourages all sorts of tactics to positively "manipulate" the search results (though I don't think they'd likely use that precise word). Good on-page best practices, making content crawlable, writing blog posts to earn links (something Matt Cutts recommends every time I've heard him speak), etc. You have some validity to the point that marketing is about influence, but Google isn't against all influence - not by a long shot.
Sorry - my definition was a bit exaggerated in the opposite extreme. I'm only saying that what we sometimes agree is "white hat" is still an overt attempt to manipulate ranking for our own gain. That doesn't necessarily mean it's bad for users, but ranking for the sake of ranking seems a bit gray, viewed from a purist's perspective. I just think we have to be honest about our motivations.
Great response Rand!
I can't believvvveeee how much traction and positive support that "WH SEO is a joke" post received. Its a little annoying but honestly it makes me really happy to know that there are so many "SEOs" out there that support the outlandish claims made in that post. It means that being a legitimate, creative, WhiteHat SEO is still a niche role...and a very sought after one.
I've had so many clients tell me that they appreciate my approach of trying to reach their actual business objectives, casting a wide net instead of chasing a few kws, and providing them with a long term marketing plan. Every client I have mentions the daily pitches they get everyday with offers of guaranteed rankings, unique article distribution...blah blah blah
I've even seen proposals from some well known agencies that include link buys as their main link building strategy! I really think there is a rift starting to form in the industry between online marketers who approach SEO with a long term, creative strategy and those that are constantly looking for the next "smart" way to manipulate the SE's without getting caught.
Personally, I am very tired of the whole hat-color discussion, which just refuses to go away. I like the way a friend of mine puts it: "There IS no hat!"
I think that Kris's post was intentionally controversial, and served its purpose very well. But I also think he made some very valid points. As professionals, we owe it to our clients to make them aware of the options available, the attendant risks/rewards of those options and help them make informed decisions. I have walked away from clients that wanted me to do things that I considered unethical or unwise, and if necessary, I'll do it again.
I don't buy links, but that's not because it's against Google's guidelines... it's because I feel that it's expensive, risky, and doesn't give a lasting effect. But then, I've not had to work in a niche where some might say it's the only viable way to compete successfully. If that day comes, my attitude may change.
Rand, the general flavor I got from your post is that you see only black and white, with essentially no gray area. That's fine, if it works for you, but given your broad readership, I would think that you would better serve the industry by acknowledging the more prevalent definitions, if you're going to breathe more life into the hat question. There are probably as many different definitions of what falls on each side of the line as this post will have comments. All is not simply black or white, but since many of your readers might be called novices to the field, I think you're running the risk of giving them the wrong impression.
Are link farms black hat? If so, you might want to look at https://randolphobgyn.com/ again.
But honestly, why are we still talking about this? I would have thought by now we would have evolved passed what color hat we wear and started talking more about what really matters. Its these repeating discussions that make me want to go further into my cave and only talk to my clients. #grumpy
Certainly no obligation to read the post Joe, but I think it's valuable to have these discussions. Sorry you didn't like it!
BTW - Don't see any link farms, but do see some stuff that doesn't look great. I'm pulling them as an example.
I read the post, and I think its very well written as I thought Kris' was. I just don't like the "hat dialog" that much, I mean apart from link bait i feel like its a discussion thats been played way to much. But I always like reading your work so i guess if someone is going to have this dialog, I am glad its you! :)
Reminds me of this: https://www.merlinmann.com/better
Black vs white hat SEO has become a religious debate. No opinions change, the only thing that occurs is the repeated back-and-forth of verbal blows that leaves both parties with a growing disdain of the other. This conversation will still happen in 2015, and even then, it will be no more constructive.
Ross - I like and respect you, but disagree (and I think the evidence backs me up). Minds are changed, so are habits. You yourself have influenced me with your writings and in our meetings. SEO isn't as politicized or religious as we sometimes make it out to be, and I think there's still tons of opportunity for good works and smart opinions to have an impact.
OK I agree that putting it at a religious debate is a bit inflated on my part, but it is still difficult to skew people on this end and I would 5000% rather see a post about SEO strategy and content from you over one about the black vs white hat debate.
I do quite a few of those you know :-) Appreciate the feedback, though I'll probably keep mixing it up with content styles; want to have something for everyone.
I liked the post. It is useful, and the title is very informative, so if there is something you are not interested in, you can jus dont read it.
It was useful for me, because sometimes the difference between black and white is a little blurry and this post clarify it better for me... I mean, sometimes you want to do something and are not certain about if it is allowed or not. It gave me some perspective and also real examples.
I guess what I mean is thank you Rand!
If you read through the post carefully, you'll see it actually is about SEO strategy and content. There are some innovative ideas in between the lines. Plus this does push me away from the ever present temptation to just throw a bunch of money at a spammy link campaign in a competitive industry.
The blackhat vs. whitehat debate should be a religious/ethical one. Cheering for blackhat or whitehat is not like cheering for your favorite basketball team. It's deciding whether to uphold your personal integrity or walk all over it.
The issue discussed here should not be whether blackhat or whitehat produces better, faster, more reliable, long-term results. It goes deeper than that. I believe we need to be looking at whitehat or blackhat in its accordance with the golden rule.
I applaud Rand for bringing up this conversation and rooting for the ethical side.
I´ve rank HUNDREDS of sites using "BH" techniques, I quot BH cuz in the old day this were not be a BH :)
My point in this and MANY forums, is DONT GO CRAZY! "decent" content and linkbuilding cautious ALWAYS works... Before panda-update with ONLY cautious linkbuilding i was able to rank almost ANY niche
I am in the experiment to create content for those site I rank WITHOUT content and now dropped BAD and comeback to tell u about it ;)
Thunder OUT!
One of the things that I'm starting to feel become increasingly illuminated by this post is "grey/black hat masking". Joe called out one of the sites on this post for having manipulative link tendencies - since then, I have noticed another one here (that I won't out) in my own backlink expeditions with links that would immediately be determined to be paid for.
I think it's important to not justify white hat SEO techniques (building really great content then spreading it), as white hat alone - often times - no, always - the most effective SEO in the world is extremely strong content and links that effectively "covers up" the grey hat techniques that large brands use to pick up exact anchor text citations. JCPenney didn't do this effectively - others, in verticals where links come in droves - it seems intelligent - and indescrinable - for them to blend in grey techniques, as it it extremely difficult to be picked up by a sniff test - and it is also the best way to pick up exact anchor citations.
It is unfortunate that these websites would be highlighted as "white" - I have no taste for the term (or "black") - but I think using websites specifically in this post is misguided, as it would take meticulous analysis from you, Rand, to properly determine the pure "whiteness" of a link profile, which requires a depth that isn't worth the time required.
I understand that the paid link is bad... but... if I want to do a product review on very popular site... and this site states that it is paid product review, and in the end, the site gives a normal dofollow link, how would Google treat it?
The main question would be: did I paid for a link or for a review/product highlight?
Thanks for the answers!
Orange is the new color dude, one day I'll tell you all about my orange hat SEO.
Ciao Rand,
first of all a disclaimer: it's 5.20 am (kid... SEO fathers' obligations), so forgive me if the comment is fillied with mistakes.
I've read Kris hater bait and now your post. I'm glad you gave examples, very good examples, to defend the WH position, as it is this fault of examples that generally I feel like a weak defence point by the WH SEO (BH are always plenty because, well, as you demonstrated, we have just to make a search).
I believe that, from what I've have wrote and said here and everywhere else in the past, that I'm all for Inbound Marketing tactics as the most effective SEO strategy to follow. But I have to admit that there are tactics that are not totally white neither really black ones that I think that for certain cases someone could find interesting to use: the so called grey hat ones.
I mean, grey is - IMHO - to know the system and to know how much you can stress the system without infringing it. That last verb (infringe) is important, because I do not want to go against the book as it is not convenient for the clients and not convenient for me either as consultant (to have a collection of banished clients cannot be good on the long run).
So... my question is: what an SEO would have to do when it comes to grey? Would she have to simply equalize them to black (even though it is not) or - if she really knows what she's going to do, if she tested it a lot, if she is 110% sure it is not against the guidelines even if it is an extreme use of the rules - an SEO can use it?
Personally, when it comes to clients (and mine are mostly small and medium businesses with limited resources) as a consultant I tend to present always the things clear: SERPs (and online marketing) are an hugly beast that cannot be won with easy games. That is the first real problem: to educate and make really understand that premise. And it is something very very hard to make understand, especially when the client does not have any technological dpt. in house (and there are so many out there). Here is where the WH SEOs tends to fail, that is the greatest problem and what makes BH such a winner on the short (as they say: wanna be first, you'll be first). For that reason, I've say no to many clients, because they did not want to listen or because I was not able to make understand the value of patience and of larger perspectives when it comes to SEO.
Finally, I come from Marketing in the TV Industry, not from IT/Dev, and I think that origin somehow helps (and helped) me to look at things in a larger perspective. As for a tv series, a website has to find its audience. And in order to find it can rely on big production values (great stars, amazing locations and photography, prime time at CBS/ABC/CBS) or do things that nobody thought before, as Showtime, Syfi, HBO or the same BBC were able to demonstrate with series like The Tudors, Battlestar Galactica, the Sopranos or the english version of The Office. That is why - I repeat - first of all an SEO has to be able to demonstrate the value of the "thinking out of the box" way. Just in that way a site can build an audience, surely small at first (the local/niche range, as I say to my clients) and from there - thanks Inbound - they can aspire and probably win the larger audience.
I repeat myself, it is exactly there were the WH practitioners tend to fail: in making understand the think out of the box values and timings, and that is there - in that fail - that all the BH/WH dispute really is.
But, returning to my question: what about grey? Because life has teached me that nothing is just black or white.
Ok, finished my comment... hope it has a sense for you all :)
Ps: the Oyster example is wonderful, but they - surely without knowing - they are going against the guidelines with their not english versions of the site: automatic translation is against the book and reason for penalization according to Google (ask Martin MacDonald, who suffered it even though he was using auto translation for a very logical and reasonable reason in its seoforums.org site).
Hey Rand... hear hear! I wonder though... is he being deliberately irritating to bait angry white hat SEO's to link back to his blog post and therefore create some of those natural, white hat links he says aren't worth getting when there's so many faster black hat ones around?! Lol... what do you think about removing the backlink and replacing with a plain text URL? hehehe
A simple "nofollow" would suffice. :)
hahaha yeh, true... no link at all is much more satisfying though! :)
Haha! True! :)
plaintext urls..... even Firefox 4 now recognizes plaintext as links.... don't you think Google would be able to do the same?
And nofollow? Really guys? Are we still claiming that nofollow links are totally worthless?
C'mon, liven up a bit!
I'm a personal injury lawyer. In virtually every "[city] + personal injury lawyer" (or "medical malpractice" lawyer or "car accident lawyer" or "birth injury lawyer" etc) your first page is made up primarily of black hat and gray hat. "Philadelphia personal injury lawyer" includes at least one firm with aggressive black hat (e.g., php vulnerabilities and irrelevant domains with nothing but links to the firm), two firms with dismal content and no legitimate links but hundreds of directory submissions, one firm with a mixture of forum profiles and "blog reviews," one firm with a dead-on domain name match, four firms that have one or two dozen keyword-specific domains that host virtually identical content to the main site (with links to the main site), and then one decent blog (with a close domain name match) that's nonetheless part of a link network like Justia. There are lots of "respected" lawyer directories that outright sell links at $10k annually or more, and tons of reciprocal link junk that I keep being told doesn't work but which, well, works.
I'm thus not so sure about the value of pure white-hat SEO, at least in my field. At a bare minimum, you need a lot of gray hat to rank well for the competitive keywords, and there are plenty of law firm sites that boost themselves by (a) running several separate domains that look like lawsuit news sites but really are just rewritten content with the editorial anchor text on keywords pointing to the firm's website or (b) running a dozen or more domains with virtually identical content. I'm keeping my fingers cross that, some day, Google with tweak things a bit to clean up some of that crap.
P.S. Rand — some time ago I saw your personal blog and thought the picture of you in the middle of drinking wine was pretentious, but having just seen that your wife's blog has an almost identical photo of her, suddenly it's now cute and personable that you both do it. Context is everything.
It definitely sucks to be in niches where most of the competition is doing black/gray hat, but my feeling is that it's also an opportunity to really differentiate yourself and your brand. Plus, it's often the case that all the white hat, inbound marketing stuff you do for SEO has secondary and direct traffic benefits of its own, building an additional strength that none of the competition's investing in.
Rand, do you really feel that the average consumer understands white hat vs gray vs black hat SEO and then is able to give brand equity accordingly?! That surprises me..
True, but the effect is sadly limited. My posts have been linked to from BoingBoing, io9, dealbook.nytimes.com, and the most prominent legal blogs (AboveTheLaw, Volokh Conspiracy). I'm even on the blog roll of a prominent tort reformer(!) with the oldest legal blog. All of that earned 100% organically, didn't even ask for the links, just wrote good content.
The result? I can catch some long-tail search terms, and Google indexes me rapidly, but I didn't even crack the top 50 results for any of the major keywords for me until I started doing stuff that's considered white hat — Yahoo, JoeAnt, etc, upper-level directories — but which strikes me as straight-up link-buying. That gets me in the top 50, but first page is still loaded with black hat.
Which gives me two options: (1) wait for Google to fix it or (2) go black hat. Right now I'm trying hard as I can to improve my white hat SEO (that's why I joined SEOmoz and SEOBook) with on-site optimization and whatever degree of white hat link building that's possible with specialized content, but, well, when someone says that White Hat SEO is a Joke, it really resonates in my industry. A couple years of quality content in the law doesn't hold a candle to throwing down $100k a year, maybe more, to an SEO that will load you up on the dirty backlinks.
@Rand - This is something that was touched on in New Orleans and I think has been echo'd a lot above, the mix of "grey" and "white together where you give yourself that boost in the short term, in order to then focus on the inbound and content marketing angles in the long term, thats the unfortunate silver lining that I see in this debate. True White Hat is hard to sell to business owners when there are folks out there offering greyhat as a ramp up to gain early value and then move into a sustained content driven inbound and social marketing routine.
I'm tempted to fully dive into all of these comments, but I have a lot of respect for people on both sides, and my own opinions in the middle. Rand, you know I hold your opinion in high regard, but I do think you live in a bubble in many ways. You have access to tools and an audience that takes years to build if successful at all, and for you, a financial nightmare with the damaged credit to show for it. Sure you made it out and you're flying, but you're the exception, and I fear that skews your view.
The end component here, is that the far black and the far white isn't the real issue, it's that Google isn't penalizing, not now and not for the last nine years, much of the spammy stuff that grey hats do.
This debate has to start with Google, as much as you are the Godfather of our specific search family with this community you've built, but their allowing and valuing of the "little sins" of grey hat will inevitably force the debate to rage on.
Kris made a lot of really good points, and I know from reading your content how annoying that must be, BUT Kris' comments came from years of working at all this. You both have a lot to offer the community, but where I guess I roll my eyes, and sorry brother but I am rolling my eyes here, is the almost religious fervor with which you denounce folks for just doing what they've learned to, because Google and Bing have failed to teach them otherwise.
At the end of the day, the fault lies with Google. As long as there is money to be made skirting the boundaries, folks are going to happily walk that line in the name of profit.
I'm on your side, as you well know, but I'm not at all surprised by Kris' post, or the reactions it generated.
That said, his post, link/hater bait that it was, is a fantastic example of inbound White Hat SEO! =)
Hi Matt - you make a fair point. When Google/Bing don't penalize webspam, marketers get trained to believe those tactics are low risk and high reward, and, often, that it's the only way to compete. My point isn't to take that blame away from the engines, but rather to suggest that the argument often made - that white hat is a suckers game that no one can win - is insanely wrong. That's where I intended to place the passion, not just hating on webmasters who've been led, by evidence, to believe that black/gray hat works (even I can't argue it doesn't, just look at that top SERP).
I think the problem with most SEO's is they want to have this on going argument about Black hat vs White hat when really they need to get back to doing quality SEO work.
I agree with the comments about white hat building reputable companies such as yelp but I feel that most of the black hat guys who have made millions via gambeling and other affiliates in years gone by (and present times) you would never hear about these guys, they are too busy making money ;)
I think all SEO's need to be aware of black hat tactics used to keep on top of the market and competitiors and see what is going on. You need to study all areas of SEO to be a true SEO is my belief.
Always interesting to see where people have their line in white hat and grey/black.
PODS, for example, sponsors lots of events and gets dfollow links from it. Yet they paid to be a sponsor, either directly by money, or by providing services for free. They wouldn't have got those links without "paying" for them.
They also seem to have their own internal lead gen program instead of using one of the large networks like CJ etc that would stick them with non-SEO friendly links. Freshbooks seems to do this as well. Is there not financial incentive behind those links? Would that blogger be linking to freshbooks or PODS without the affiliate comission that comes with it?
There's an easy way to check... how many other links in their sidebar go to companies with totally clean, affiliate free links? How many links go to companies without sitting under a header of "Sponsors"?
If they're not linking out to any companies without some sort of sponsorship or rev-share deal, how editiorial are those links?
If a PODS competitor with no affiliate program, but a better customer service popped up, how many sitewide links do you think they would earn?
Wait... The real question is... Does this Propecia really work?
I think it would be naive to say there is never any reason to ever use any "black hat" tactics though only with the clients knowledge and usually never on a main site, but as part of a more comprehensive strategy. (I know I know - but I do know of times where it has been legitimately needed say in a site that is under a blackhat attack.)
However, I am a white hat evangelist and as I always tell clients that Google is not looking to weed out the good SEO strategies, but the bad ones that create spam. So, if we approach it like the Jenga puzzle that graph 2 illustrates that it is today, the sites in the long term hold their rankings better, stay longer and cost less to maintain.
Why? Because as Rand said you are not always chasing the algo, so you are not always trying to stay one step ahead as this or that tactic gets nabbed and devalued and you have to supplant it with another. In fact, it seems, from the black hats I have known, that the cost is a great deal more in the long run as they have to continually buy links and run the algo then it just does to do it right in the first place. Sure you may not get there in 7 weeks, it might take 10 or 12 or even 6 months, but when you do you also don't wake up one day to find your site has suffered a severe an unrecoverable penalty or perhaps just gone to page 2 because all the links you bought were devalued.
So thank you for this post Rand, so I can use it whenever I need to as a reference and when a client needs to see that white hat does work. I know it does for me.
What an amazing post. I have been creating my site for 2 years now, and actively learning how to SEO it for one year. It is sooooo tempting to spend hours and hours on developing black hat strategies. But really, I can see that those hours would be much better spent creating amazing content and spreading the word about my content.
I was going to suggest my site as a totally white hat one but as a new SEO I have experimented with a small amount of shady stuff that I wish I hadn't. :)
The thing that has helped me the most though was the creation of a great piece of link bait...totally white hat and it gained links from some great authority sites.
I really do think the day is coming where a good number of black hat techniques that people get by on today will be devalued (or penalized) by Google. So, I plan to play by the book and I will be proud to show my site's progress!
"not one has done 8 figures (excluding a few truly dark hatted individuals who've earned their money from porn empires or illegal activities). "
I guess spamming doesn't pay as well as being a top SEO guru...
There are plenty of non millionaire white hat seos too...
I've been testing that whole "content is king" thing. I've been writing for years, and I recently realized I've got tons of documents saved on my hard drive going all the way back to middle school, from research papers to informal essays. I thought, hey, I think this stuff is really good content, let's put these online, throw a couple unintrusive AdSense on there, and see how it goes. I've got a couple other personal sites linking to it and that's it.
I've been adding a few pages a week, and suddenly I'm ranking for terms and getting a few hits a day. I've even made $0.01 in advertisements so far, and I'm ranking #1 for "compare and contrast boromir and faramir." Haven't picked up any quality backlinks yet, but I believe they're coming. Don't stop believing.... If I'm lucky, things will pick up some more and I'll earn a dollar by the end of the summer.
Hey, a dollar saved is a $.75 cents earned after taxes..... :)
Hi Rand,
I agree with your larger point. But some important context gets left out when you narrow search marketing debates to terms only SEO's are comfortable with. Much like The Colbert Report, maybe something is lost if your world always uses Fox News as a reference point -- even if only to lampoon it.
Specifically, I'm referring to the lack of recognition that on "buy words," (you actually centered your discussion around the phrase "buy propecia") ... a large proportion of click volume and conversion volume are coming from the paid search part of the screen. In your screen shot, you talk about what "users see," but you only show ten blue links type of listings. The lack of paid search and product listing results in this space is a bit of an anomaly given that pharma companies with patents seem to prevent ads from being shown, and Google has a strict policy on this area. And much as I think it's silly, finasteride -- like many other marginal medications that are or should be basically OTC -- is *prescription* medication and you're "supposed to" go through your doctor.
In other words, the example query you used is inherently black hat, at least as far as Google, the FDA, etc., are concerned. Such fields, Google largely "leaves for dead," it seems to me, knowing that it is essentially a spammer's playpen.
In many other fields, if you typed a "buy word" such as this, the most accurate depiction of the page would be to show how much screen real estate is taken up by the three premium position ads, and how good and relevant they are; and by other relevant ad units, such as product extensions.
While this reality may cut into debates about SEO tactics for ranking well in the ten blue links, it's important to show that context. As helpless as Google often seems to be in its policing efforts against spammers, the overall context is that users see quality results in various formats.
As for Zillow et al., this is tantamount to suggesting that the best SEO successes come from having huge, great, content-rich, A-list clients who have landed in the tens of millions of VC financing and who have millions of users, etc. While SEO helps build that, the fundamentals are already very strong.
That's fair, and if you're working on a project like that you'd be a fool to waste time with black hat shenanigans, as you suggest. But more than anything else, it just sounds like there are different kinds of projects for different kinds of people. It's a personal choice. I know the one I'd make. I haven't had any interest in black hat SEO since Day 1. Things on the so-called white hat side are always plenty busy.
Taking an oral product to address only your scalp is a prescription for unwanted side effects, BTW :)
Enjoy Sydney!
Andrew
It just isn’t a black and white issue. It is a GRAY issue
As always Rand, great post, but I think you side stepped the issue a little. Kris was speaking of Grey Hat techniques, and even he agreed to stay away from Black Hat. I know it is very relative and there is no real label for each technique, but there is a world of difference between what a black hat may do and what a grey hat would.
Just wanted to add one more thing...as a relative SEO newbie, I was wondering if anyone has a list of what types of SEO are considered "grey hat"? I realize that there are likely a lot of opinions on this and not all of them will agree!
But what "hat" would these be considered:
-Widget building with anchor text built into the widget?
-Purchasing expired domains in order to link back to your site?
-Sponsoring an event in order to get a link back to your site?
Dr Marie,
Did anybody actually answer your question? Seems like most White Hats seem to skirt that issue? All I'd say is, anything you're doing that you don't think you should be doing is probably a shade of grey!
Sponsorship isn't an issue though, it's legitimate, just so long as it's relevant to your company/strategy.
I think there are a lot of good points both in Rand's article above as well as these comments.
I have a slightly different challenge with the white hat vs. black hat issue. I deal mainly with very small clients, individual professionals. Many are very good at what they do, and they don't have large or even medium budgets to do SEO. As an example, I work with an attorney who's been voted one of the top 3 in his town for the past two years running. He wants to use the internet to bring in more business. Adwords in his line of business can cost $15 to $30 a click. For $400 he can generate 20 visits to his site. He won't get any business from that.
He doesn't feel he has time to blog.He doesn't want to podcast, or do social networking, or write whitepapers, or do research. He's an attorney. He's a terrific attorney. Very few people would want to read what he has to say. They don't want to read about accidents and how to protect yourself. They want to hire someone who will take care of it for them. And that's what he wants to do. He wants to try cases. He wants to ply his trade not become an information resource.
Why should that be the advice for him - create an info portal, create a rich experience for the user. Alot of small businesses don't want to become information portals.
I have a great carpet cleaner. They have a revolutionary process that will dry your carpet in 20 minutes. They want to clean carpets. They don't want to write 250 pages of information on their website, and blog, and post comments, and network socially. They want to clean carpets. And if you want your carpet dry quickly, they are best game in town. So why shouldn't they have a chance to show up on page one of Google because they're good and they're willing to invest. Why should they become a library when they want to be a carpet cleaner?
Have you looked at the pods moving website you recommended? It's 500 pages or more. Why? Are there 500 pages that you want to read? That anyone wants to read? No. There are 5 pages or fewer that anyone wants to read. Mostly their homepage and a few pages about what they do. They wrote the extra pages for SEO. They have hundreds of pages that all say the same thing but are targeted at different cities. That doesn't add any value. It's there for SEO. How is that white hat in any true sense of the word?
So where's the line for white hat? And is the only valid online business a business that wants to entertain or educate browsers? What about the working guys who just want to do their jobs and do them better than other businesses around them? Why should adwords be the only option for them?
Well said. There are a million other niches and businesses like this as well. This whole "white hat" way of doing things is silly for businesses like this, and frankly slow. Just about every example posted there is a business that took years and years to reach the position they're in, AND they are the provider of the goods/services, not an affiliate.
You can have good content that is useful to the user, while at the same time promoting your site above other 'whitehat' sites. Why does Amazon deserve to be at the top of the rankings for every product keyword? They have the Amazon "Vine" program that gives out free shit to people in return for reviews. Do you think those reviews are going to be legit? Definitely not. Yet they're promoted to the top, with usually zero links to the actual page, simply because they have an Authority site. I have zero qualms with doing everything I can to promote my sites above theirs, and if that's grey hat then so be it.
The white hat way just flat out doesn't work for a huge swath of niches/services/products/professions that would like wider exposure quickly. Take a dentist for example. The whitehat way would be having that dentist do some sort of PR campaign by doing free work for a local shelter and mention it to a newspaper in hopes that he gets some links to his site. Then he would have to do daily blogging about random dental topics. Then he would have to tweet and facebook, and all sorts of other BS to get 'natural' links. OR, he can pay someone like me to spin articles and blast them out to directories, spin blog posts and post them on hundreds of blogs, add sitewide links on high PR sites, and optimize his on-page content. Totally hands-off for him. I know which one I'd do if I was a dentist.
11. Sleeping easy at night knowing your position is built on solid natural foundation.
Sans hair? Ha! We may need to have a font design contest for that. =)
We could call it Harial :)
or Baldwin :)
White works for me https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=seo+consultant+vancouver 1st position
ok, ok, not a great deal, specially beacuse I don´t care about rankings, but there it goes.
Does nofollow for siloing still work? I thought that internal nofollow links couldn't be used for linkscuilpting anymore because the link juice was virtually discounted instead of preserved.
The thing is I implemented them before the nofollow isue and it never harmed the site. Next step is removing them and check if there is any efect.
I bet it makes little to no difference, at least in my experience.
Preach it, brother!
When I launched my agency back in December, I made a hard-line decision to be as white hat as possible with my SEO practices and I believe it's paying off significantly. I had straddled gray practices on occasion in my youth, but given the way that even the lightest of gray activities are being hunted down, it just doesn't seem worth it in the long run.
Plus, white hat practices get me clients like the real #1 seat for "online dating"... the one that isn't OK Cupid ;)
Jeff @ Fang
Great post Rand, insightful and objective. The biggest problem I face is with small businesses, where both time and budget are in very short supply. SERPs are dominated by black/grey hat with low cost, fast results and minimum time committment required. Persuading these businesses to spend more money and more time cultivating white hat results, just in case Google decides one day to more visibly penalise their compeitiors for keyword stuffing and irrelevant inbound links, is a very hard sell. When 12 months down the line, the same companies are still dominating the SERPs with the same techniques and approaches, there are some very difficult questions to answer about value for money!
Probably the most important reason why I'd never do black hat is described in this article.
If you are doing black-hat, you are essentially playing AGAINST Google's engineers. Knowing how talented people they hire, I don't think an SEO company can win that war.
Whenever Google makes some major algorithm improvement, there are those who will hate the world that day and there are those who will open their web statistics with a big smile on their face. I like to be the one thats happy when Google's happy. It's much safer bet.
There is also this thing called "moral". The sense of right and wrong. Since black-hat allows you to place the content thats not the best quality to the top of the results and push better content down the well, it's not fair towards the end-user - the consumer. So you're not just playing against Google, you are also playing against your customers.
Rand, this is spot on. Lately I've had to turn away new clients because they're actually requesting Black Hat strategies. Last month a woman tried to explain to me that someone told her she should be looking for a company who had a program that could "automatically post comments on blog posts with keywords" and would "guarantee page one rank" on generic terms like "public speaking".
This was coming from someone who worked for a respectable company (who was asking her to request these bullet point items), and had little to no knowledge of SEO of her own. After trying to explain to her the difference between ethical and non-ethical SEO, she couldn't understand why, basically, I wouldn't spam for her. Because obviously, that's what an SEO company does, right?
So shameful. There's still an art to SEO, but clearly the respect for it has plummeted. We have a different angle on selling our SEO services for this very reason, unfortunately we obviously haven't gotten the idea across clearly enough yet. Working on it.
Whew! That post was exhausting for my brain. I feel like I need a nap after that one... I thought that article marketing was White hat but it seems that it is not. Going to rethink my strategy now.
Thanks Rand
White hat methods will help you lift up on the search engines without the fear of looking over your shoulder the whole time wondering when Google is going to ban your site for unethical practices White hat methods will help you lift up on the search engines without the fear of looking over your shoulder the whole time wondering when Google is going to ban your site for unethical practices
Amen. I am as white hat as they come and run from anything black hat that I can. I just don't think I could feel like an honest SEO or honest person if I were black hat. I admit to doing black hat things in the past but that was when I was starting out and didn't even know what black hat SEO was, I thought I was doing what you were supposed to do. Anyway, thanks for sticking up for us.
Ok i am converted. Thanks for this. Gotta change my profile name :)
Unless its natural, all link building is Blackhat!
According to Google’s TOS, natural links are links others point back to your site without the need to pay for it, ask for it, comment for it or insert a link in your article to gain it.
So, if all link building strategies are in effect manipulating search engine results, doesn’t it stand to reason that all link building is Blackhat and the majority of off-page SEO practiced by SEO firms is in effect, Blackhat?
Probably the first time I've read this long blog post and even all the comments. Great stuff and debate. Thanks!
My first ever comment on SEOmoz blog :)
While whitehat methods are definitely tools for long term success, (building a brand, connecting and gaining the trust of your visitors) they are of little value to the people who are in it just to 'make bank'. You fail to mention just that, the overwhelming numbers of people all around the world trying to game Google in every possible way. For every white hat SEO there are 10 guys in elsewhere selling linkwheels and Xrumer blasts.
Learning certain blackhat methods does take some time, and it's definitely not a '1 button solution'. But until spammers (the majority of them use Xrumer and or scrapebox) are sufficiently detected and stopped from making cash, this problem will always continue. I haven't really paid that much attention to the blackhat scene for about 6 months now, but from what I can remember, the majority of people seemed to work something like this :
1. Buy exact domain name
2. Hire writers to write to write 10x500 word crappy english articles that make no sense.
3. Start building forum profile links, steady increase each day. Feed the forum profile links into scrapebox and then backlink those. Activate your 1000 twitter bot accounts (tweet attacks)that have each amassed legions of followers, start tweeting about your site thus faking social interest. Do the same on facebook with the wide variety of black hat tools available.
4. Slap adsense (but risk a ban, but hey : you've got 20 adsense accounts!) or amazon affiliate feeds on your site5. Wait untill Google catch on, which sometimes never even happens, then just repeat the process. (but it's possible to pump out a site like this every day) You could outsource this whole process for little under 100$ (or do it yourself in a few days) and gain nice rankings and make a decent buck.
It just doesn't make sense to do whitehat SEO from the perspective of someone like the one I described above. Especially people from lower income countries where a few dollars can actually buy you food for a few weeks. No wonder there used to be so many 'autoblogs' :D
From an SEO companies point of view, I think it is absolutely necessary to stay almost 100% white hat. The only exception being specific promotion or advertising websites that only need to rank in a given period of time.
I really enjoyed this article, would love to hear you go into specific blackhat methods a bit more.
Rand, thanks for correcting the viewpoint that was expressed in Kris's article. I have to admit that when I read that I was seriously ticked. Then when I read the comments from everybody I was a tad confused and even more ticked. You really calmed this situtation down with facts that can't be disputed. Thanks for your authoritative words, and continued expertise you provide all of us SEO's.
For me, white hat SEO is more of a "relationship builder" than so-called "black-hat", spammy techniques. I do agree that you can't ignore one side over the other, as there is something to learn from both, but I also agree that those who say white-hat SEO is a joke are just too lazy to come up with a creative way to market their not-so-interesting products and/or services. I work for an air and water filter company, and I spend hours a day coming up with creative content ideas, and I've seen, firsthand that it works. We actually get interaction from our Facebook fans, and don't feel like we're blowing up their newsfeed with spam. It is hard. It takes a lot of work to get links from "authority" sites that want nothing to do with commercial industries, but it's not impossible, and in the long run, it's worth it. We are working on two very creative campaigns right now that are bound to attract links from all types of sites, along with print media recognition too. When I first started this job, I thought we'd run out of ideas. After all, there's only so much you can say about air and water filtration, right? But over the last year, we've made connections with lots of people - environmentalists, non-profits, even colleges and universities. And the way we did it was by coming up with creative content, some of which seemingly had NOTHING to do with air and water filtration, and finding a way to relate it to the goods we offer. Similar to what the writers on Copyblogger advise when it comes to creating compelling headlines (ex. "5 things a bad dog can tell you about writing good copy" - Dogs and writing have nothing to do with each other, but that's exactly why the headline gets your attention.) If you're in a "boring" industry like water filters, but can find a way to relate to people on a PERSONAL level (something spam, and many other black-hat techniques just can't do), then you're bound to attract their readership, and hopefully their business as well. Relationships are everything when it comes to marketing. If I can build relationships around the concept of clean air and water, and I've only been in the SEO business for about a year, then I think anyone is capable of using white-hat techniques to build their business. You just have to be willing to think outside the box.
There's seems to be fine line between what is White Hat and what is Black Hat. This article seems a little vague on which is which ... in certain situations. Is article marketing white or black? Only if you spin the articles? Or blast them to thousands of directories? What about blog comments?
I know it's easy to spot most search engine spam, but some things aren't so easy to see. You could be practicing some black hat techniques right now... as I comment.
I agree SEOs should always be learning all they can on both sides ... but they should also be learning all that's in the middle. Like most things in life, it's not always so black and white.
Bravo! It's black hat SEO practicioners and spammers that give the industry as a whole a bad reputation. Then they defend their actions by claiming that since everyone else is doing it, it is the only way to compete. While it make take longer to see the results of a white hat SEO campaign, they are going to be more long lasting and beneficial than anything black hat SEO can produce.
I've been doing SEO now for my company for the last 2-3 years and it continues to frustrate me. Every expert has different opinions on what works or not. Company A believes XXXX.........while Company B may say the opposite is true even though Company A is successful at what they do.
It seems to me like everyone (even some of the well known companies) is doing "grey hat" or possibly "semi black hat" SEO technicques. I recently went to an SEO conference and many of the experts talk about "advertising" to increase your websites importance in the eyes of Google. They basically were telling me to buy links which Google supposedly does not condone.
I continue to research and look for the right, "effective" techniques to use however there are so many different opinions out there about what is wrong or right it makes for a long and frustrating process.
Morning,
Im interested to have a chat with you about SEONext and our service to see what we do and how we work,
We dont like to be branded like the other SEO companies out there “But we are not the only companies in the UK that do a good job “They are just hard to find!
If you are interested plese drop me an email [email protected] with any questions and I will be happy to come back to you.
Cheers
Matt
I am eager to see what his rebuttal is to this.
When it comes to doing your own thing, fine do whatever you want to rank. You may not have the ethical fortitude to not be okay with sending millions of people to a ringtones site where they can win a chance to "meet justin bieber" but by opting in they're subscribing to jamsters $10.99/month subscription. That's on you, that's your reputation.
When it comes to being an SEO for a client, hold it right there. You are representing this company, and it's reputation. And when you get caught(and one day you will) you're putting not only that companies reputation on line, but yours as well. I have a very hard time believeing that the 2 companies overstock and jcpenny hired are doing well right now. '
I am a 100% white hat SEO, but I understand how black hat could be tempting. Just as writing the answers to your math final were tempting in college, you may have gotten away with it, but you're sitting there at the age of 40 today with a degree you didn't fully earn. It's all down to ethics.
BUT when it comes to representing someone other then yourself, good luck with fulfilling that disservice in the end. And have fun explaining why they were on the first page and why they have been dropped completely off the index. In that Kris, I ask you, what's more of a ripoff. Your tactics to game the search engines until they catch up to you, or our service of 'slow and steady wins the race'.
He stated he doesn't engage in full out black hat, just "dabbles in the gray area". And I'm curious, have you ever had a site de-indexed or penalized?
I personally haven't, but close friends of mine have woken up to find their sites whiped off the SERPS.
They were also "dabbling in gray hat".
This was a number of years ago, but I can only assume no situation like this has happened in my life because they learned their lesson.
As SEOS it's our job to give the searcher the best answer to the question that they have. If you do just that, and only practice white hat SEO you will find that, that's all you need.
If you've never personally had a site de-indexed, how do you know what the limits are? How do you know how far you can stress the system?
I'm not an SEO, I'm a developer, so your ethics don't really apply. I gave pure white hat a fair chance. I create content respected by my peers in the dev industry, and it hasn't really helped rankings at all. The only reason I still engage in content creation is for the sake of appearing credible to prospects and for the sake of self improvement. But from a search point of view, link exchanges, directories, and footer links outrank me for my desired term.
I'd argue that some anchor text just doesn't make sense in normal dialect, so your only option at that point is an artificial link. And for many local businesses, that's enough to get them ranked higher and move on with their lives. Now for the big shots with large budgets (such as many of the sites listed in this post), the game changes a bit.
Thats it in a nutshell. Amen
Good post and solid rebuttals.
I do have to say something from the perspective of a non-professional SEO: there is a tone that is very unsettling and counterproductive between White Hat and Black Hat enthusiasts. That tone involves quite a bit of judgment of one another - not just on method or approach or philosophy - but of "all white hat" or "all black hat" categories.
I think removing the moral judgment associated with their craft will reveal that that's exactly what it is: a craft; a job.
Morning Rand et all,
Very interesting post, I read the original last week and was wondering how long it would take for someone to bite :P
I think alot of the time the shade of the hat depends on:
1 - Time
2 - Contacts
3 - Imagination
Oh and the link pointing to Simply Hired is broken...
What a great read on a Sunday. Personally, trying to rank in a highly competitive field as real estate (specially being geo-centered on an area with very worthy competitors, such as Maui), I see many of those ahead of my site obviously using black hat tactics (i.e. paying for links), but I've been building my trust online by contributing to the leading national blogs in my industry. At the end of the day, they can buy their links, I will build earn my authority. Rand's post only makes my resolve to remain white hat more absolute.
Looks like no one has mentioned that Kris' post was just to make a point about how being controversial is good link bait. I think that point has already been made so I question his motives but anyways...he proves the point, again.
Rand, I really appreciated your views on the topic. While Kris had some excellent points, whitehat, blackhat, effective and ineffective are definitely not mutually exclusive. His choice to seperate white and black - and then call out for the dismissal of hat colors makes me think I'd also like to dissolve the colors of hats; rather, I prefer to see Spammer vs SEO. While you can go out and spam teh internetz full of crap content to rank well, like you mentioned, it ruins the web for the rest of us.
When you market for real companies that plan on not having to change their name out of embarrassment, there is a competitive advantage for whitehats. I don't know a legitimate company that would stand for spamming if they found out their "SEO" was doing it. +1 for sustainable business building. If you're grey/black-hatting your client's site and telling them that you're building their online presence, you're lying.
The only sustainable way to rank well in competitive niches is to build a real brand and become truly popular.
I was going to comment something similar earlier as well.. I think maybe it is spammers - vs SEO as all the hat colors get very blurred depending on the environment you are in though I still say I can outrank you using my whitehat methods I get why in the PPC of SEO people do use the darker ones.. ;)
I know we've talked about this before AJ, and I think you make a really great point. If you are creating a site to build a brand, then it is important to use white hat tactics when creating your links. You are building a brand, and don't want to risk that site getting knocked out of the SERPs. Spot on with your comment!
I think the web is going through an evolution which is beyond rankings and link building. We are still at the transitory stage that is why still we are bearing the brunt of the black hatters.
Google which introduced the PageRank concept to beat the keyword spamming which took place in early 2000 to give us quality results has reached a stage where the PageRank concept is also being manipulated by the so called link building spammers.
So everytime you try to solve one problem and come up with a solution that again gets misused and you have to again rebuild something else more effecient and powerful. This is an ongoing process which is a part of the evolution process which leads to innovation and progress. We have again come at that stage where the search ranking algorithms have to go beyond backlinks and start rewarding quality content and cater to more net savvy people in 2011 who want more than just 10 blue links as search results.
Vivek Wadhwa's talk in the second video on https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/the-new-information-age/ clearly says that Google has to innovate and display more detailed information as search results. If this takes place then automatically sites which have the relevant information and the quality content will start ranking.
But currently the image shared by Rand above regarding the inbound marketing is the only quality way to build natural links which in the long run will not only future proof search engine presence but also create a good online reputation.
Black hatters can do what they want as I think the evolution process of the web which is taking place will automatically push them out of the web eco system.
As the integration of social media, importance to user generated content, the ability of the web to record every action and preference of every user on the web is gradually shifting the power in the hands of the people which has the potential of creating a democratic atmosphere .
Rand I do not know how you would look sans hair, but I surely know that the WWW is surely evolving to a more open, honest and a democratic place as the very systems which black hatters think can be manipulated are the ones which are recording every click , preference and action of every user on the web and we all know that the search engines have access to all this information hence it all depends on the search engines how well they use this data to seive out the junk and retain quality to cater to more net savvy people in the coming years.
We as SEOs have to do our bit by educating the client on SEO, make them more net savvy and make them have more realistic expectations from the SEO campaigns.
My opinion.... will just be the 150th opinion on this long thread. My method is aligned with Rand, whose point seems to be Do Good, and Do it Well. Kris has valid points that if all you do is create great content, then you are a writer, not an SEO. Also heard him say at NOLA that it's not a question of morality, Google does what is good for them, and we all do what is good for us.
So which of these is an SEO? - a great content writer- a great content distributor- a great getter of results
I think Rand would say all three, and Kris would say only the results-getter. (Of course they can say what they want, don't need me to insert their opinion.)
The debate has reached a semantic crossroads, imo. People with different functions are battling over ownership of the title Search Engine Optimizer. I think Rand and folks aiming toward the "make great stuff" tactic deserve a new word to describe ourselves. One that encompasses Writing, Designing, Publishing, PR, and SEO.
Well done and well said. I was waiting for this after seeing you mention it in the Twitter stream. I read the post you referred to--which made me a little bit pissy because I do SEO writing.
Your post comes at a good time since I just unsubscribed from two newsletters that were affiliate promoting software that was suppose to help with link building. I should have known when it said "not black hat" that it was. I trusted one guy who sent it but not now.
Eesh.
What is a bit annoying these days is having to sort through a bunch of crap when I am looking for quality sources. When my site first went up, this kind of stuff wasn't a problem (1995) or was I dreaming?
Now I am currently reworking to balance good content with SEO. I played with the recent petite lap giraffe because I saw that it was trending up and because a journalist pal was so upset by how many people were being duped by it that I could not resist.
It was an experiment. Inside the post was serious information for my readers to learn from. Now the whole PLG marketing was a clever advertising strategy. I found it interesting to watch products popping up and a bunch of different sites rising to the top as people caught on and began working to take advantage of it.
Personally, I just keep plugging along and am working to see some new juice later this year because of it.
Thanks for your information......I am new to SEO....now i know about Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO......
as an SEO in North London we do find this a bit frustrating subject ( like many others in our industry I'm sure)
I think the main issue with the medium-sized business client if they don't believe you when you tell them it takes time... this tends to mean if somebody if somebody with a black hat comes along and promises them the earth within 5 min they want to listen to that story... the problem is our business is so technical when you try and explain to them why that's a bad idea they just can't manage it.
I always felt bad that I am not using black hat techiques. It just doesn't stick to my innerself as I like to deliver real value. I blamed myself that I don't want to be as effective as other SEO guys. I don't feel guilty anymore :) Thanks!
Organic is definitely the way to go.
I'd one day like to see the complete abolishment of spam. It's probably never going to happen, but we can dream, right?
very good post Rand
make sure you correct the Simply Hired broken link :)
i am new to seo, thanks for pointing out how close white hat and black hat can bee to one another.
Great post. I would make more of how pressures from the economic situation govern buying the decisions in smaller firms. It's not that people have no patience, it's that it is a luxury they can't afford.
Rand nicely contrasts 'Black/Grey' tactics (narrowly focussed on quick hit links of any sort) against the wide 'spectrum of Inbound marketing' tools. The real strength of White Hat is that if you execute all these tactics well, the total effect is way in excess of the sum of the parts. Sophisticated management and marketing departments in larger firms are most likely to get this.
But decision makers in Small/Med businesses typically don't think like strategic marketers in any way, shape or form. They have fires to fight and need someone who has a bucket of water right now. If that guy is slightly shady, thats not a problem. Standing in the White Hat corner saying you could build them a better business after the present one burns down, won't win you any deals.
So a quick hit in the SEO department sounds pretty good to them. After all, so what if it doesn't last - neither does PPC & that's legal, right?
Thanks for mentioning Ron Hazelton's site. Ron has methodically worked on leveraging page titles and content to serve two masters - his visitors and the search engines.
(His projects and tips work, too!)
Hi Rand, I agree with, White Hat seo is trusted work
Wow! That is a lot of content to go through, but it gave me some nice link building ideas and has helped in getting rid of the controversy of White-hat VS. Black-hat. Ethics and proper SEO rock! Great stuff Rand.
A big problem not addressed by Rand in this article is white-hat organizations being in business agreements with organizations practicing black-hat tactics. For example: I was hired on to manage classesandcareers.com/education, an education blog for classesandcareers.com, and our news articles were produced by a 3rd party company, Brafton, on the east coast.
Ignorantly, I trusted that our news provider was producing unique content. Their articles would come into my inbox and would check them for spelling, grammar and formatting. I neglected to check for duplicate content or quality. Brafton did us a great service by helping our articles be worthy of Google News. Their reps coached me through the application process and eventually we were approved by Google.
The downside to this whole situation was as soon as classesandcareers.com hit Google News our articles automatically came under the eye of several universities whom we were writing about. They paid close attention to us and I started receiving phone calls and emails from these organization accusing us of copying content and reproducing it.
To my knowledge we were not penalized by Google or any other search engines. But our content was scrutinized by our industry. If Google doesn't catch you then your industry will. If your industry loses confidence in your content then you will quickly see your business go to crap.
On another topic I want to reach out and ask all you SEOs out there about ranking for misspellings. I recently started a blog about bodybuilding. I reviewed a popular pre-workout drink called "Jack3d". I spelled the product wrong by calling it "Jacked 3d". I quickly ranked for the 5th position on this misspelling. My friend pointed out my mistake and I changed the spelling in all my articles. Now I hold a rank of about 20 in Google. Are targeting misspellings a black-hat tactic? And how do I ethically get rankings for misspellings?
真的很不错，我是一位来自中国的SEOER研究者，痴迷于此；经常浏览你的博文。写的不错、也让我学习了很多..但是纵观中国的SEO以及SEM的现状，黑帽SEO是很盛行的，比较知名的一些知名企业也在采用这种黑帽激进的方式做营销；另一方面，在中国的现状，人们对SEO职业者的一种态度,现在虽然说很多企业都做SEO了，但是并不真正的认识了解到SEO真正做的是什么，他们认为的只是单单的做排名， 做到 google NO.1,他们更在乎的是短期内你这个SEOER是否能创造出价值；说实话，作为一个SEOER，在中国混口饭吃真的很难。现在中国也有很多比较牛的SEO研究人员，但是有大部分的人错误的导向，使得人们的观念对于SEO:只是做排名。真的很费解，这个状况何时能改变....... .keep it up!!!
You are more than right. Actually you are so right I would not even bother contesting with Black-Hats SEOs. They are the ones who are contesting instead of building true websites for the users only.
I tell this from a lot of experience. I own the biggest websites in my country for the subject of Waterproofing. I have made an honest work and ignored almost everything else. Content is the king, and these spammers can not create content so they can not make a good website. Unstead- they try endless tricks to make Google think their website is legit. It is like selling a Fiat but calling it a Mercedes. It does not work for long.
Through hard work i have beaten all them "huge websites" and nothing can strike me down because i have tons of legitimate content. While others spent years spamming, i have spent it on article-writing, and now it is simply way too late for them to compete !
Only White SEO works. On the rest I report once or twice a year, and shoot them down.
Thanks for good article and the hell with them copy-cats artists !
Thanks for sharing this blog. Keep it up
A great read. Be careful of 'selective evidence' though - picking only the examples that support your claims. For example, #1 & #2 for the term 'mortgage' is bankrate.com ... you trying to tell me that those 16,000 inbound links are white hat? 16,000 links and 169 facebook likes *scratches head*.
I agree with your principles, and that being a parasite of any kind is not a strategy for success in life - but people will continue to do BH as long as it works. It's human nature to seek the easy road; most people would rather be on the beach sipping a margarita than in the office staring at excel docs; this is why true professionals are rare. Most want to get from A to B as fast as they can, but I do agree that trying to take short cuts very often gets you into the most terrible trouble. Building a career and a life on solid foundations is often the shortest cut of all.
There are few 'true' black hats outside of the pharms and porn niches etc... for most it is a case of figuring out exactly which is the optimum shade of grey. People will do whatever they can continue to get away with.
It is interesting to see this debate ranging on. I don't think there needs to be a divide when it comes to SEO. Search optimization is the same word no matter what techniques are used. Whether or not those techniques have staying power is another conversation and to be honest, what works today may not work tomorrow regardless of what content you put out or how it is put out. There were many good content sites that were hit hard by the latest Google Algo update and they all thought there were doing everything white hat only to find that they lost big time in SEO.
If you gain top rankings in Google and can sustain it for some period of time, then you are doing well. If Google changes tomorrow and you lose those rankings, well then it’s back to the table again. I think many people who try black hat techniques find that they are hard to sustain, and so they have to spend more time constantly trying new things, but they are still working and gaining rankings when they find something that works. Good for them!
SEO is a very difficult venture no matter what techniques are used. There are no instant black hat tricks that will gain you top rankings now and everything needs to be worked in order to be successful and Rand makes a good point about the one retiring black hat that built all of the horse racing profiles. He actually built good content while trying to spam the system and with a simple tweak would be a completely legit white hat technique instead of a black hat spam technique. The point is that he had to actually work at it to get it to produce and that is SEO, regardless of the hat.
Good rebuttal to the previous article. I had read the previous article and it had some good points. There are a look of tools/procedures out their that are considered black hat because of abuse. They work very well if done right. I have always use strickly white hat concepts on my important websites and if I want to try anything that maybe questionable (grey hat mainly) I always try it on one of my throwaway sites. White hat produces the most important factor every SEO'er wants; long term growth and stability. When you accomplish those two items the rest falls into place. True blackhat brings one thing. Quick results that you can show a website owner not experienced in the IM world that you are "producing results" sometimes good, many times bad and almost always bad ROI. Thats why the retention time is so short in the industry. When someone hires me for SEO its an educational process also, you have to educate the owner/orginization about the ins and outs of the world of IM and SEO and back it up with proof, studies, etc.... This is what wins them over and makes for a successful long term partnership.
Sorry to say one linke brocken
in the place of back link Simply hired have www. simplyhired.co.in. please check one
https://www.simplyhired.co.in/
Does anyone else think it's hilarious that the post that launched a 1000 comments and blog replies is running twenty-ten?Also, I think that it's doubly ironic that his post about how tough it is to get organic links probably is the best link bait on his blog.
As far as the "white, black or gray/grey" debate it basically boils down to semantics. It's good to follow the guidelines but if you aren't pushing the envelope a little bit you probably aren't trying hard enough. Also the longer I have been in this industry the more critical I have become of Google and their practices. Let's face it, their alogrithm is responsible for, or the reason for, most if not all of the link spam/article marketing in the first place.
Is it me or is link bait just a SEO term for a great and enticing title? I don't see anything wrong with provocative titles. Unless when you get the post and the post sucks, it seems this is just something authors have been doing forever, thinking of the best title that is going to give them the most reads. Is "link bait" black hat?
I loved the article! Wow, long, but every minute worth the reading. I want to be sure that my websites that I am running are being marketed properly and are SEO friendly. Thank you!
Great blog... I agree that white hat SEO wins in the long run. It's not worth it to even mess around when it comes to your business. I have been using white hat Seo forever and it's paid off. I tell all my business clients if you work with me I will only use White hat SEO.
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When I first started working exclusively in Online Marketing in late 2009, I was initially horrified by the prospect that links from such low quality sites such as directory and article content farms would enable sites to rank well!
18 months down the line now have a different perspective, in that time have come across some unscrupulous SEO's who care about nothing except for making money for themselves, when people like this profit from Black hat SEO makes my blood boil!
However have also come across SEO's + Link Builders, whilst obviously wanting to earn a good living themselves, do genuinely care about the success of their clients sites and giving their businesses, etc an excellent return on investment and value for money.
On that basis feel it is important to bring other elements to the debate such as cost to the client, return on investment, cost of white hat methods and employment of people in developing countries.
> Cost to the client : Many small and medium sized businesses and sole traders cannot afford high SEO costs particularly in the first few years whilst building up their client / customer base.
> Return on investment : Using directory, article + bookmark submissions can lead to a decent rank in competitive industries and give smaller businesses a chance to compete with companies with much larger budgets.
> Cost of white hat methods : Whilst it would be wonderful if all web content utilised by SEOs was top quality, good looking and engaging the reality that good design, content writing and the time needed to social network properly can prove expensive for those on a tight budget.
> Employment of people in developing countries : Outsourcing link building to countries such as India has positives as well, as long as staff are well paid and do not work in sweat shop like conditions then means more people are employed full time in a decent career with prospects.
As long as utilising some tacky, unattractive, poorly designed and developed directory, article + bookmark sites and some half decent web 2.0 sites and social network sites. To enable clients (who have nice websites, with good design and content and / or offer a good product or service to their clients / customers) and well intentioned SEO + Link Builders to earn a decent living, then personally think lessens the issues with some of the methods used to rank well in the first place.
Anyhow, feel this comment could lead to a blog post of my own on the topic!
Wow! Such a great Rant! Deserving, too! Even though I have been marketing on the Internet for a number of years I greatly appreciate your reminder of why I choose to do things properly. Essentially it is a matter of integrity...I know when I have done things in a "white hat" manner and reap the benefits, even if it takes a little longer. I can look at myself in the mirror knowing I played on a level playing field, and not because I know shortcuts. In my long life I have learned most short cuts are not, and you will have to cover the same ground again. Not worth it. Thanks again for the "grounding reminder."
Ron F.
https://coachronforrester.com
Now i got what is Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO....Thanks for your information..Keep on Sharing
Black hat is short term, white hat is long term.
It's just that simple.
OOPS I totally disagree with your theme idea.I recently sell a domain at a very big price.its PR 5 and free theme with alexa in 10k.The idea I used and content I provided the world in years is far more considerable than the free theme that I was using.
(Google) "Would I be doing this if search engines weren't around?"
Yes = whitehat "SEO"
No = grayhat/blackhat SEO
Erm, hiring an SEO company?!...
Surely SEO needs to be simplified so that a layman can rank their own site?
That is what I am trying to do, I learned html and css in order to make my own site and the obvious thing to do is to try to emulate the sites that are ranking well for your keywords. It is google themselves that are advertising the virtues of black hat by not removing these spammy sites effectivly.
I think another main point is that white hat seo is expensive, the lines between white and black are so blurred that you have to hire a proffesional to "maybe" utilize white hat. You then have little way of knowing if your instructions have been followed at all.
Maybe google could make search results optionally customisable so that sites rank for variables controlled by the user or so that users can choose to omit results that fall under certain criteria.
Excellent article as always, Rand. I couldn’t agree more with the idea that we have a responsibility to understand how black hat operates. Being well-rounded is really ideal in almost every endeavor.
Anyway, still love your site, Rand, whether you have a full head of hair or not. I was going to make some quip about white hair vs. black hair and what's more likely to get the babes, but I feel I've been enough of a smartass for one day.
OK, next on the agenda (sorry, guys and gals, needed a food break): I have to LOL @ "navigation for engines, not humans" placed in the blackhat category, which is where it belongs of course, but consider that Google frowns upon ANYTHING done for the engines and not humans (aside from, what, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, nofollow, canonical references, ...?) Google has given everyone a question to ask themselves to determine whether they're on Google's good side: "Would I be doing this if search engines weren't around?" Yes = whitehat "SEO" No = grayhat/blackhat SEO So to answer one of the questions someone asked: no title / retarded title = neutral descriptive, natural title = whitehat "SEO" keyword consciously shifted to start of title for search engines = grayhat/blackhat SEO In its SEO starter guide, Google says to pick a title that communicates the page's topic, that is unique across your site, and that is brief & descriptive. Note that this is the sort of thing a thoughtful individual would do if search engines weren't around. Presumably keywords will naturally find themselves in titles as a result of following Google's advice (topic-related, descriptive), but note that Google, while condemning "unneeded keywords," says nothing about keyword position or any such supposedly "whitehat" details. If search engines weren't around, a title may result in which the keyword is naturally tacked on at the end for grammar reasons, euphony reasons, or whatever. Here's what that mischievous grayhat/blackhat site SEOmoz recommends: Place Important Keywords Close to the Front of the Title Tag According to SEOmoz's testing and experience, the closer to the start of the title tag a keyword is, the more helpful it will be for ranking and the more likely a user will be to click them in search results (See below). OK, now let's think about some of that other "whitehat" stuff: Q&A sites, forums, and comment marketing (LOL @ "comment marketing" -- best whitewash 4 eva!). Now... ignore the shitty rationalization about providing those sites with "valuable content" in the process of your shameless plugging. Can you honestly -- HONESTLY -- say you'd be on those sites, providing your "valuable content" as it were, if search engines weren't around? (OK, if you're on there for direct traffic, it may be immaterial whether search engines are around, but forget these little details for now.)
I'm putting myself out there a little bit but still all I can say is thank you. Being kinda new to SEO I was given bad advice which I'm ashamed to say I carried out. But while doing this bad advice (black hat) it just didn't feel right. I mean, I didn't use any automated tools or anything like that (even though I thought about it and was tempted by all the noise out there), but spending time looking for blogs to comment on just for a link back just became depressing after a while, and never felt right. It's like, I don't like spam on my site so why am I doing it on other's site just to rank highly in a search engine - a ranking that has proven to be non-sustainable using such methods.
I am honestly glad to have spent the time to read this post, because it's content like this - written with thought and care and is actually useful - that will beat any competing article on a site using blackhat methods.
Here's to better success using white hat (and not just focusing on getting backlinks)!
Thanks again
LOL @ "blackhat is short-term" and "whitehat is long-term." A second is short-term too, relative to a minute, an hour, a day, a year, a decade, and so forth. But with enough seconds you can make a minute, an hour, a day, a year, a decade, and so forth. THAT is the blackhat strategy, NOT some flash-in-the-pan tick of the clock, some clinging to an isolated second that can never be recovered. When you string together a whole bunch of fly-by-night operations, you get fly-by-month operations, fly-by-year operations, and so forth. It's important to note that the "long-term" in "whitehat is long-term" refers to some future Google utopia in which blackhat SEO no longer has the "short-term power" that people on both sides of the playing field admit it has at the moment. I'm not saying this utopia is unachievable, but there definitely isn't enough evidence at this point to call it either way, which means "whitehat is long-term" may amount to a pipe dream (with the usual exceptions of big brands, famous rock bands, deep-pocketed entrepreneurs, well-connected hipster kings, etc., though I think it's disingenuous in their case to call it whitehat SEO). Think of it in more practical terms: You have some blackhats dominating you in the SERPs. Then they get de-indexed. Goodbye, "short-term" blackhats! Time to celebrate? Not as long as they can repeat the operation with a new set of sites, it isn't (and repeat it quickly, by definition). They may use the same tactics or different ones. Only way you're going to win is if the blackhat tactics no longer work at all. And since this debate is still raging, I assume everyone tacitly admits that the blackhat tactics DO still work. Bend over, whitehats! Time for the next incarnation of your "short-term" pounding! (Read my profile if you feel you're going to fly off the handle.)
I also hate spammer as well as black hat seo as i think everybody have to hard work and should be link build manually.
Hello, I am very new to the internet marketing game however my business is extremely dependent upon it. I opened a new barber school called Premier Barber Institute, www.premierbarberinstitute.com and I am in need of a low cost, white hat SEO company. I am told there are some good Indian companies but the ones I've encountered are spammy. Can you or anyone recommend a good solution? I really appreciate your time and assistance.
Charles
Every approach has its own value, but the thing we should care about is reputation of the website. There are two approaches as you discussed. White hat seo service and solution approach is used by them who mean to make long speculation on their site.
The post represents a strong proof of the white hat methods’ advantages. When dealing with “right” SEO, you actually at some point start to think about using “something else”… But this article gives reasonable arguments of why we shouldn’t. Thanks! Some articles related to the topic can be looked for on deindex.pro. Is it worthy devoting time to?
Great article, as always. Looks like we chose the right side!
Fantastic post Rand! Sending it to all of my clients as this post makes a compelling summary of why companies should spend more on White Hat tactics.
And so on. A great tool for this is Google’s Keyword Planner, which has recently replaced the Adwords tool. As you can see from the image, I’ve searched using the key term mentioned above and narrowed down the audience to the countries I would like to target and the industry niche that the site is in. This gives ideas for Ad Groups (for PPC) and suggested keywords that perform the best.
Thank you Rand for this great post! I think it is as relevant in mid 2014 (or even more so) as it was in 2011. There are so many perspectives on SEO in internet and although I'm following SEO topics for years, every knew method makes me think whether I should or shouldn't use it... It is always so tempting to try because the ones who "Promote" these (grey/black) methods sound so convincing and reasonable, but the risks are not so obvious to me.
I joined a fresh new start-up RentMama car rental just a half year ago. It is expected from me (as an CMO) to get results fairly quickly, but there is so much to do with the website before it even has a chance to rank. It's inner structure is poor and any long-term marketing strategy almost non-existent. The car industry is so dense that it's unlikely we will rank anywhere near TOP 10 any time soon, so the quick&dirty tactics sound very tempting - "I'll just do this one little black thing to get the word out and then I'll be good". You post was an encouragement to keep to the path and vision. Thanks!
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Hi Rand, I am new to SEO and I find this information very informative...
The way you present those tactics or on how you visualize those relevant info above like words in diagram now it's easier for me to understand.
I am optimizing these two sites https://www.itechrar.com/ and https://www.cebucontractorsassn.com/ I am doing self-study now so in order to understand what SEO really means I have to start on basics , so based on what I've understood from the above discussions I come up with a question,Is Black hat and White hat SEO are kinds or ways of SEO ? and I jumped up into a conclusion that white hat SEO is more effective than Black hat seo because white hat seo is long term rather than black hat.
Now I've understand the difference between the two. Now, I guess I have to continue study the effective ways of link building because I still have a few learnings about it.
above all,
thumbs up for this ! :D
Not sure about hats, I kinda like beanies better. With that said, would you consider SEnukeX a white, gray or black beanie?
This is an excellent post. I think with the new release from Google, White Hat is really the only way to go. Those companies that were following the black hat procedures will eventually start dropping in the rankings on Google. There is also nothing worse than searching for something on Google and irrelevant websites popping up as they link to websites that have nothing to do with their topic what so ever.
Great article Rand. I have to admit that I agree with politics of white hat vs. black hat. The way I see it, It's basically how good and bad codes of ethics manifest in the profession of SEO and Internet marketing. I'm very new at SEO as a profession and it seems that there is some tension when this topic is discussed. I think it's safe to say that no one is going to change anyone’s mind on the subject matter but its great how discussions like this can affect those observing. I have learned a lot by reading many articles and posts like this one and want to encourage more of these forums for the sake of those willing to learn from them.
I want to bring up a few thoughts. I bet there are a bunch of SEO's out there without a proper ethical and good practices teaching or a good SEO mentor. I'm sure so much of the black hat practices are things, like stated before on the thread and in the article, can be blamed on ignorance and learning black hat tactics and not know they that's what they are. I'm not making excuses but merely bringing up a point. For those taught that the black hat ways are ok, they will not be convinced otherwise. But as soon as someone comes to the knowledge of what black hat practices are and they realize that's what they do and have been doing, that's where the rubber meets the road. The decision someone makes from that point on will show their character and will determine the length of their success. I know this from my own experience coming from another industry and I was that person.
If you have been doing SEO for a long time and you learned to do it in a manner that fits the descriptions of black hat practices like what’s being presented in this article, then I would challenge you to think about what some of the people like Rand are saying about it. There really does exist a code of good and bad work ethics and I think the terms white and black hat can be applied to every industry out there. But if you are still in denial and ignorant to the idea of there even being a difference between white and black hat tactics than to you there is no problem and everything is ok. Good luck with that.
If you are knew like I am to SEO than I would strongly suggest learning what the right things to do and the wrong things to do are in this business, as I am. I do not want to start my profession in the wrong direction and end up at a very regrettable destination. Flying you can be off by one degree and it will put you in Russia when you were trying to get to Australia. I wanted to just say great article but I guess I got on a rant. Here's a great quote that I believe is relevant.
In making judgments, the Early Kings were perfect, because they made moral principles the starting point of all their undertakings and the root of everything that was beneficial. This principle, however, is something that persons of mediocre intellect never grasp. Not grasping it, they lack awareness, and lacking awareness, they pursue profit. But while they pursue profit, it is absolutely impossible for them to be certain of attaining it.” - Lü Bu-wei 246 B.C., Chinese Prime Minister under Emperor Ying Zheng, The Annals of Lü Bu-wei, Lu Shi Chun Qiu
I find it very funny someone named "integrity marketing" would quote Lü Bu-wei's saying as being ethical. He is a renowned extortionist salt mercent who manage to put his bastard son into the throne of Qin by giving his prostitute wife to the prince of Qin. Ying Zheng is the first emperior of China who is a renowned tyrant that wiped out out kindoms and commmit racial genocide to entire race of people, buried alive scholars, burnt books, and if that's your definition of "perfect". I guess you must work for Google :-D
Sorry, nothing personal, just be careful when you quote someone, you quote someone of virtue, not someone who aid evil tryants. But I guess Whitehat SEO is a way, is strict adherence to the tyrannical rules of Google, and you spend your entire life not knowing when you'd get your head chopped off by the next mood swing.
Great exemples, thanks for your post. Btw readyforzero.com is really hot... ;)
Great. I learned a lot froom your blog posts man. And I invite those who want to read more about White hat SEO to consult my blog. I wrote it in my language, so beginners won't get to lost :) here's my seo blog article https://www.maurisource.com/blog/white-hat-secret-seo-method-naturally-increase-serps/
-Manesh CEO at maurisource
This article blew me away. Thanks, Randfish. I practice White Label SEO and have done so for many years, but also have those calls to rationalize black and grey hat practices. Unlike you, I hadn't seen clear divides for these two factions, and oftentimes even contemplated on tilting my hat at a steady 45degrees, but lo and behold, days of reading and I'm converted to stay with a white hat creed -"take it as a challenge and do SEO creatively." SEO sure is hard, especially for impossibly rare niche, but I'm feeling the edges and staying white.
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This is a great writeup. I really have to agree with @randfish about this article. SEO resellers should learn from this. Do it organically and I'm pretty sure that google will give you what you need.
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Great Article - Helped loads
made some really good points... This article was more than enough to motivate me to continue studying white hat seo and putting it into practice.
So, you're saying 'sitewide' footer links are bad? Referring to a fat footer section? I've read Google understands these are for navigational purposes and doesn't ding us for duplicate content or other negativities. SEOmoz.com even uses these.
Can you expand on your meaning of using sitewide, footer links?? Or just point me to the comment or post that already address this?
THANK YOU
He was referring to inbound links in the footer, not to internal links, which clearly are navigational.
Those external links are usually quite spammy, and probably discounted by Google
I'm trying to find some more claification still. Do you know of a website doing this I could check out? Or, does this just mean, don't put outgoing links in the footer section?
Sorry if I sound like an idiot, some things take longer to sink in. ;-)
P.S. Thanks for the response!
Hi Matt.
As far as im aware, from my experience you shouldn't fill your footer/side column with external links, as you see many link farms using this technique. Google gives links in the sidebars and footer more authority than those in the content section you see! :)
Who are the millionaires of black-hat? Especially the 8-figures ones?
I like the "take time to invest in these" presentation, but some of these are really really generalized. So, what I would like to do is to put some words out there and you tell me if they are white, grey or black hat - I am asking of course because of the recent Panda update (and many more to come), but also because I believe in WHITE hat. But, it seems like sometimes one person screams WHITE HAT WHITE HAT and really its... not. I want my websites to get good traffic and sales, but I am only willing to do that with white hat tactics.
So here we go, some things I have run into:
I guess that's it for now. Personally, I have been doing Article Marketing for years, but I have changed my techniques and my tactics. I used to submit to MORE sites. Now I ONLY submit to the top 30-50 high PR article directories out there. Wiki posting seems like it would be spammy to me. But, then again, I want your opinion :o)
Thanks,
Kiki Rose
Not sure why my last post was deleted. Whatever.
Great post, love seeing something like this that was posted in 2011 still get brought up and catch attention a year later (this post is testimate enough to how great content and white hat marketing bears more fruit than black hat, 1 blog post: 2500 tweets, 400 facebook shares, 40 g+'s *on a post that was written before G+ existed I might add*)
I personally had a brief brush with what I think may have been a bit of Grey hat when I was starting out without knowing exactly what the differences were. I got slapped with a Panda refresh pretty significantly, yet after learning the differences I have seen great progress for my clients without having to grit my teeth to sleep.
Great stuff as usual Rand!
I'm a white hat SEO and love what I do. I believe that a time will come when webspam will be pushed back and the work I did will be appreciated. My blog is https://www,manishpandey.com
Your list is very compresive and straight to the point. I agree with Mozalbin that Black Hat is short and White Hat is permanent. When I wrote tips for buying the best infant car seat on my blog I ensured that I promoted the blog using White Hat method and it paid well for me! All in all thaks for sharing this post with us
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Thanks for this post Rand. I full agree with you on the fact that SEO occupies a part of webanalytics. However, when i speak about this point of view, i can still see some people who disagree ? Am i crazy ? Am i too confident to think i should merge seo+webanalytics in order to have seoanalytics ? I don't think so and i can see via your post you think something like this too.
The experience about Bob Rains and his "black hat" strategy was fun to read. I am a black hat so i overall product interesting contents :D
I agree with everything here, Rand.
The only problem is that when you're starting out, going White-Hat is a huge risk. Because MANY NICHES are NOT compatible with what you argue is the way forward (guest blogging, social, conversational mentions, etc.)
And in order to protect your domain against competitor abuse (and yes, competitors CAN and DO get other sites penalized with mass spam link building), you need to have some domain authority. It's a matter of chicken before the egg. You simply can't do it fast enough to protect yourself against those kinds of attacks.
Similarly, white hat sites that are paralyzed by advice like "article marketing is bad", and "sending out press releases for SEO purposes is bad" are at risk of having their content outright stolen by scrapers/spam networks, and losing the content "original authorship" in the eyes of the SE.
Wha'ts Bob the ENT surgeon supposed to do to promote his local clinic - assuming that the 2 official websites (or whatever) in the industry can't give out links? Go on Facebook and start "socializing" about hearing loss treatments?
What about Jim the commercial building insurance agent. Should he start creating "viral" tweeting campaigns about the exciting world of insuring commercial buildings?
It's a complete joke, and you know it is.
Once the phD's at Google realize that FACILITATING REVERSE SEO is a bad thing, and do something about it, then White Hat is obviously the only way to go.
Till then - I would personally advise people to run seperate GrayHat sites/campaigns at the same time to hedge their bets. Because at least they can guarantee some level of domain authority with a GH project. Can't do that with a WH one... and I'm a sitting duck after I build it, hoping "they" (links) will come...
-Chris Rempel
PS For a much more in-depth argument in this direction, maybe you and your readers would be interested in a blog post I just put up today. Titled: "3 Reasons why White Hat is Far Riskier than Gray Hat".
Perhaps it should have been titled "Succeeding With Google – And Why You Have to Break the Rules in Order to Survive Long Enough to Follow Them"
I stumbled upon this while searching and thought the article was great! I also thought that it only further backed up your reasoning behind writing good content and how valuable that is. I will come back to seomoz for lots of info now. However, I have one question for you. You say that article spinning is one of your least favorite activities currently and dont like its growing popularity. I disagree slightly and maybe I am wrong, but it seems article spinning would only be wrong if the content is not yours and you spin it hundreds of times in order to spam. If I write good content, spin it several (5 to 10 times) for others to post it so they dont get any "duplicate content penalties" if those do exist, then I only see it as an avenue to share good content to a wider variety of people that wouldnt have stumbled across it if it was only on one site. I dont steal content, I spend hours writing my own content, but I feel like I can get a slight advantage by putting several copies of my own content out there. Is this spamming, black hat, or is this a legit way of building links and sharing solid info? I think its legit but now after reading this I am not sure. Please respond.
White hat always give you success, but the thing is when you adopt white hat tactics you have to be calm and steady in work and also stay cool for the results, it definitely works for you thanks rand for one more time :)
Thanks for that amazing article...
I just started to work on SEO within a small startup in Berlin (www.lucrato.de)
Black hat seems easy and is supposed to show quick succes (what is very important especially for young startups) but I am convinced that white hat will surpass that in the long term and seomoz always helps me to argument in favor of white hat.
Because, well you probably get the traffic form ranking first, but what if the customer is not buying anything if your side just looks crappy or is just not the side he wanted to see…
Thanks for that guys from Berlin
Great post Rand! I think the Panda / Farmer update was the first step in ridding the web of spam and definately a step in the right direction for Google.
However, do you think that as Google evolves and gets tougher on the black hat brigade then we will get a spam free web or can you see their techniques evolving to allow them to continue to spam and use black hat techniques ?
Excellent post. One thing though - black hat and spam are often used together as if they're interchangeable. Does black hat automatically mean using spamming techniques? - Jenni
As a copywriter/SEO I just have to ask this, especially after the comment from the guy who mentioned he wrote dozens of blog posts, it took him hundreds of hours, and he did SEO for only a few hours and got better results.Here's the deal: I have around 250 blog posts and counting, write 1-2 new high quality blog posts a week and I'm planning to move to writing 3-4 a week. But I've been thinking: isn't it way better to write little fresh content and to focus way more on promoting the content?And at the same time, my cash registers ring because of email marketing. The blog is plugged into my emails thanks to RSS feeds and the ability to send RSS updates via email, so writing less content means people get to see my brand way less often... UNLESS I write more emails. So, one way or another, I end up writing content with the difference being that it's focused on making the sale. Honestly, I need some help guys. Is that the way to go?
Great post Rand.
Obivously a big part of the problem as I see it for white hatters is that black hatters just get away with their trade so easily, which could definitely explain why Kris' post got such strong support from the search community.
It definitely makes you wonder some times why you should be doing white hat when you could just keep cheating the system, particularly in markets where black hat almost seems the only way of getting to the top.
I also guess Google et al should be reading this post and taking more notice - get your spamming team bigger and more reactive and the white hat approach will seem a lot more attractive than getting penalties.
Not sure what other people thing on the above point?
I hate being naive here.. and i hate reading those comments.. everyone knows Black Hat SEO would work for you if you hare applying it nicely... White hat SEO is for long term.. these wierd black hat ppl are spoiling everything.. they are spoiling name of title.. spoiing reputation.. chaning scenaio.. everything..everytime i talk with ppl they say how much time it will take to make my keywords on first page and if i say it depends upon your website service competition everything.. and their reply at that time is like.. common xyz company is delivering the same stuff in like 3 -4 months WTF .. are these ppl dumb or what ? It really pisses me off whenever i read of hear from these kind of ppl.. this post is accurately well said.. loved reading it.. it was like m reading my own words :P
Hurrah!
I've been looking forward to this post all weekend. Thanks Rand! It’s a great defence of certain ideals and there's an important warning: the increasing acceptation (and success) of blackhat techniques will lead to the ruin of our whole business. I'm sure that users’ confidence in search engine results is eroding away as we debate this point.
There are a lot of young people coming into this business; graduates are looking for jobs in big companies with SEO and web marketing responsibilities. Kris's article (although I'm sure he'll argue that he's just saying that we're all grey hat now) is echoing a common belief that whitehat is old school. Young web marketers are therefore getting straight into blackhat (or greyhat) without really understanding the alternatives. So rather than this being a rehashing of age-old arguments I think that it is a timely moment to popularise this debate.
I also introduced this notion of Black Hat / White Hat in a conference to local businesses (in France) for the first time recently because I can see that a lot of client's expectations are actually blackhat ones. Example: A Brooklyn B&B (to give an internationally understandable example) who wants to rank for "Manhattan Hotel" doesn't want SEO, he wants to cheat. They don't call it black hat or cheating though - they call it SEO!
It gets more and more awkward explaining that this is not what you do!
- Neil
Possibly a bit dramatic, but: "Evil prevails when good men do / say nothing..." I think Rand is a good man doing something!
Seriously though, I think the hat-color debate is one worth having, and as a firm believer in white hat techniques, I feel that knowledge & awareness of 'the dark side' helps us steer clear of it - as well as all the benefits mentioned in the article, it's a sense of acheivement that comes from developing a true network of people sharing an interest through quality, relevant content that helps you sleep at night and also gain some kind of joy in your work.
Keep it up.
Excellent post and I agree with most of it. Whitehat is obviously the long term way to do it, but as long as blackhat techniques work, people will do it to get the quick buck. Programmers will develop tools for link spamming and mass content generation, which I see the biggest issue. Anyone can spend $100 and get the tools to spam 90% of the internet.
Hello Rand Here is one more examplate of white hat SEO
Keyword : VoIP Billing System Website: AdvancedVoIP.com & SEO Agency: www.BizExcel.net.
need to 301 that non www to www!
Is it still whitehat when you spam mentions of it on SEOmoz?
New to SEO and this has been the best read so far... Nice post!
Hey Rand,
you don't have to look a hipster for life. A beautiful face needs room we say in Germany. Also Propecia's main side effect is impotence. Tell your wife that "F@$#ing" doesn't work anymore when you take it.
On the white hat vs black hat debate: It's boring. Of course white hat works and black hat does as well but white hat works in the long run while black hat works for a short period of time. For people who use throwaway domains there is no Google penalty that can scare them. For normal webmasters real black hat SEO is no option. On the other hand I see paid links everywhere so as long as you are white hat mostly or a brand a few paid links do not break a site it seems. I have lots of competitors who outrank me with paid links.
I agree the standard of white-hat SEO is ethically (and probably legally) justifiable for many reasons, not the least of which is the drastically reduced chance of penalties or backlash. I also (strongly) agree that building a better site creates positive ripples throughout the business, but I question the claim that it is more of a "long-term solution" than the alternatives. Just as the dark side looks to exploit loopholes in the algorithm, the light side often seeks to appease the latest whims of Google et.al. I'm wondering how much clients would appreciate that we did the right things when they fall out of favor with the engines. I like to think working harder produces superior results, but I'm not entirely sure that's true.
This is a great post, Rand. As an in-house Whitehat, I'm surprised (and sometimes apalled) but the tactics pitched to us by potential vendors. I agree with you that SEOs have a responsibility to understand the ethics behind SEO tactics and steer clear from the types of links you wouldn't be proud to show your mother (or Google).
Many companies don't understand the ethics that go into SEO and hire firms for results alone. If you have one firm saying they can provide x and another that provides x + 1, you can see why many companies would go for cheaper firm if they don't understand the industry. Hopefully recent stories like JCP and Overstock will bring black hat consequences more mainstream.
Can we stop citing JCP? Seriously, they were asking for it by being retarded with their link buying, and it took a NYT article to get them penalized.
Regardless of how or why, they got caught and paid the price. And not only that, disrupted this entire industry.
You can't evaluate something based on an example of it being done stupidly.
Go Rand!
There isn't that much to say apart from Rand is right again... White works and always will work.
There is no doubt that a few years ago companies didn't ask what kind of seo you did, they didn't know they just wanted results. Today companies ask for whitehat seo and that's why so many blackhat seo's go white these days,
But one thing for sure, whitehat's will always be able to learn from blackhat's :-)
The only thing I disagree with is that directories are spam.
If the directory submissions are verified before being approved, then directories are actually a great way to "filter" the spam for search engines.
For the rest I agree completely.
Yeah - not all directories are spam; I was trying to specifically call out low quality directories that post junk. If you're talking about directories like https://ethnicity.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/ or https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~igiddy/, those are awesome.
not to change the subject but this article may interest you about propecia nad sexual dysfunction:
https://science.slashdot.org/story/11/04/09/0151206/Mercks-Drug-Propecia-Linked-To-Sexual-Dysfunction?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29
Funny - someone else asked me about that in person, which made for an awkward conversation. I'll just say, so far so good :-)
I was considering looking into Propecia based on your recommendation, but the information on that page is a little frightening. I think I might sit on the sidelines while that debate blows over.
I still think that "baldness" can have some sort of fascination... ok, maybe I think so because it will probably be my future ;P
But, hey!, Yul Brinner was surely fascinating :)
I think our site qualifies... I'm certainly no SEO, more on the "writer" side of things - but between what I've learned from SEOmoz and the guidance I've gotten from @blafrance and AuthorityLabs, I feel like we've made significant headway at NICOclub.com .
A lot of our competition uses some fairly "grey-hat" techniques (especially the large, corporately-owned sites), and it makes me feel good that we're able to outrank them in many cases, especially with a rookie like me at the helm.
Thanks for the great articles, Rand & Co.
p.s. How's that Propecia thing doing? Recommended? I'm getting a little sparse on top as well!
Yeah, I've found it to be effective so far.
Congrats on the success w/ NicoClub!
Effective, eh? Yeah, go on, rub it in.
Hair is like SEO - some people start out black, then turn grey, and only with maturity turn white :)
@eRocket ROTFL Well said...should show up in a post somewhere.
Excellent post and thanks for the mention. Even though we only recently launched we would love to hear from SEO consultants who are ready to help us :)
We will continue to stay true to our vision without compromise regardless of what the rest of the industry does...
rod [at] readyforzero.com
Wow...well covered response, Rand! I never knew SEO could be so controversial. haha
Great post, Rand. I was looking forward to the response, and it didn't disappoint.
Other than a time-sensitive situation where a website must rank well for a holiday sale or upcoming event, white hat SEO is the way to go. I really like what you had to say about taking the strategies of black hats and finding ways to mold them into more legitimate, non-spammy, white hat techniques. Your comment about being creative and producing quality content that will transcend in-bound linking if and when the engines shift their algorithms to put more emphasis on something different such as social media sharing (as they are doing now) is a really great point and cannot be ignored.
For quick, artificial jumps in the engine, black hat is the way to go ("renting" your ranking, as you put it). For long term, sustainable, wealth-building rankings, accept no substitute - white hat is the king of the hill.
Good coverage and response Rand. I like the summary in the end and the list of things we need to be thinking about.
p.s. whatever ones opinion on this, hats off for Kris for creating a classic "controversy" link bait :)
Great article Rand. It is well written and you provided solid evidence to agree and disagree with Kris.
What I really appreciate about your article is that it enforces the “Do The Right Thing” philosophy in SEO and inspires me to “Do The Right Thing” as well. I’m a current Web Design/Web Development student at Seattle Central Community College and I appreciate hearing that the right way of doing things is the better route. Yes being a black hat can bring in some money but like you said it’s not sustainable and it’s not as much as you think.
My friend who does SEO work at Microsoft would tell me about all these black hats making money online, how easy it is, and how many accounts they have to penalize or shutdown because they’re doing it the “black hat way”. So it’s good to know that going the white hat route is the way to go.
One question I’d like to raise is, will there ever be a point in time where black hats will be extinct? Probably not. That’s just like asking will hackers ever be extinct? But the good thing about this is that they will make white hats more creative. In way, white hats need black hats and vice versa. I like the part of your article that talks about how Bob Rains joined the white hat forces. It’s good to see people get converted from the dark side just like hackers are needed for Information Security.
Thanks for the great article.
-Marcus
Great SEO works :)
thanks for this one Rand! I just want to add some of my thoughts right here:
We always do see the wohle SEO business from the agency or consultants point of view, but rather never from the point of view of the customer. And it´s also quite clear that "Black Hat" isn´t determined a 100% to the point. There is no exact line between White and Black Hat. And this means it´s quite often the competiton and the customer that determine the SEO-strategy. The cause is the inefficient and unsufficient timescale in SEO. Customers need to have a planning on the ROI of advertising spendings. If the customer needs to have a positive ROI within the next 6 months from the start of alle SEO measures, then as the agency you sometimes need to takes measures that are rather grey than white, if you don´t want to loose the customer.
But in general I totally agree on what you´ve said, a 100% White Hat should be the goal in all SEO activities.
That was a pretty Epic blog post Rand. Certainly need to re-read it again, its 8:40 am on a Monday morning!! :) Still good job man.
This is really very helpful article, i will bookmark it and share it to all my social networking friends.
Tons of information - great statement and - like always, usful further links to read!
Great information..as usual...but some time you feel bad, while you are doing hardwork to get better placement for search engines,implemnting your creativity to establish your websites on best serp, and (few of compettiors) black hat's,scracthed contents creation,MFA created keyword rich domains runied your work by dominating serp...!
Black hat. Baaaaad. White hat. Goooood.
Gray hat. Hmmmmm.
Gray hat. Kind Goood.
Great post Rand. I think the short term (to some) is more important than long term. It should be obvious if you are a company or corporation to go with a white hat SEO strategy because it's substainable. However, I can see why it's tempting to use blackhat SEO when marketing short-lasted offers (time sensitive items like holiday deals or event deals).
I think the following quote from your post sums it up for a lot of White hats"
"One of my favorite parts of being a white hat is chearing for the search quality teams rather than against them, and getting that little bump in traffic every time they improve the quality of their algorithms."
The better Google and Bing get at being relevant search engines, the better our efforts benefit. Many of my websites saw a huge jump with this last update from Google (Panda, Scraper) and I know I was doing a little dance in my head when I saw the results of the update.
Thanks for this, some great 'take-aways' I've saved onto my HD to benefit my clients and to reinforce why things are done the 'right way'. It's sometimes hard to get people to realise that ranking isn't everything, but conversions is what their business really needs. Much appreciated.
There's an easy way to explain it. Hold a fifty in one hand, and a piece of paper that says "You're #1" in the other - then ask which they'd rather have....
Usually gets the point across.
To be totally honest, in my much humbled opinion, ANY effort to manipulate search engine results for "clients" or otherwise IS blackhat. SEO IS blackhat...and I speak as a user of the internet. If a site is sitting in the number one position because an SEO firm put it there, then it is not a natural ranking. THAT is Black Hat all the way
Mark
Don't really see how anyone can say that.
it's just marketing.... If Google gives guidelines as to how to get to the top, wouldn't you classify someone who follows those guidelines as following "the rules" and therefore whitehat?
Dear Mark... following your way of thinking every marketing action (tv adverts, radio spots, print ads, infomercials, packaging, email marketing...) must be considered evil, as they manipulate people.
Sorry to tell it, but your statement is quite preistoric and out of the world.
And I suggest you to use Wikipedia as Search Engine ;)
I tip my white hat to you Rand! Great post too bad the black hate space will always be around because it seems to be human nature to want to always cut corners in order to find the golden egg. A wise kid once said " I can make you milk and cookies but if the oven is broken all you are getting is milk". In some strange way this can apply to tackling certain keywords.
Wonderfully put Rand!
Black hat is ruining an industry that is filled with talented individuals who dabble in the creative and statistical.
We are building businesses who rely on SEO for sustainable business we therefore owe them a white hat strategy.
We all know Google will prevail and black hat will be driven out of this town.
When I first became involved in SEO I believed in White hat and still do!
Great Post!!
I think the search landscape would benefit from further categorisation.
It is not simply the case that non-white hat SEO tactics can be attributed to laziness and lack of creativity. There are a wide range of factors that influence business decisions, such as budget, skill-sets, ROI, security, industry......
What if company x has a great product, a great website, great content, but competitor y has a stronger back-link profile due to the employment of a link-building company, and company x is not visible?. What if company x has better content and products than y? What if the industry has no buzz, no bloggers, no back-link volunteers.....
Company x is not spam, but actually what the end user is looking for. Should they simply sweat it out in obedience to Google ?
PPC - it gets the word out.
I always try to be as white hat as possible when performing SEO. What would be considered "Paid Links w/ Manipulative Anchor Text"?
Also what is comment marketing?
I totally did not mean to spam this. Sorry. So much for my first time commenting on a blog post.
Is it just me or does anyone else find "Social Bookmarking" outlined with a black box a little telling?
=)
Easily the best SEO article I've read in a very long time and picked up several other articles of yours to read, such as Ranking for Keyword + Cityname in Multiple Geographies. Definitely spending quite a bit of time here.
Holy crap. I'm new to this SEO thing, but that's a lot of stuff. I will have to agree though... the one thing I've noticed, is thata lot of success stories built around marketing, specically Mingle and Under Armor come to mind, had a great product underlying what they were selling. I suppose that s the whole moral to the story.
-Sam
www.awkwardengineer.com
Starts slow clap from back of room
Thank you Rand, for so eloquently expressing what it is we do and why we do it. I forwarded this to my clients as your list of what an SEO should do is a summary of all my proposals. Go team.
Hi Rand, great post, I always appreciate your input on such topics as well as learn a few things.
I though I'd add my 2 cents...
As someone who is fairly new to SEO I started working with some small companies who were not getting much from their websites in the way of traffic or conversions and since I am a web developer who had read a few artices on SEO I thought I could help.
My main work involved sorting out page titles that were poorly written, adding description tags, adding some H tags with relevant keywords, sorting out the code of the site to get rid of tables etc, adding the site to a few directories and buying a couple of links.
All seemed to work well as I got a lot of good results - perfect i though, this SEO stuff is easy.
Turns out I was wrong. The sites I was marketing were small niche sites that would have SEO'd well if the site had been developer properly in the first place - having titles like "Homepage" on the index page did nothing for the company, once it was changes to "Luxury toilets for hire in xxx" then it started ranking well. The reason - no-one else provided luxury toilets for hire in that location. The brought links did nothing for the site.
I later realised after getting clients with more competition that these tactics did not work as well as I first thought.
I have recently done some SEO work for a new client and through some well researched WH SEO have got them to rank in position 5 on Google for a certain keyword (up from position 48). The purchased links I had brought previously had no effect on their ranking what so ever but this WH work has performed well.
I see WH SEO as the way forward (with a touch of grey hat in places) but my personal experience shows that black hat can have a small effect on ranking but does not seem to last long.
Taking on board the advice from this blog (as well as using the awesome tools) has helped me and my clients, people who perform black hat can keep at it if they wish, I believe WH will will in the end.
Anyone else see the "Buy Propecia Online Easy order processing, no prescription required. Lowest price" line that's at the very, very bottom of the screen in a grey bar when you hit reply and then toggle fullscreen?
Hmmm......
BTW Rand - did you know that Propecia is actually nothing more than a less-potent form of a prostate med that you can get much, much cheaper? Keep that hair without tearing it out paying the high prices of Propecia - talk to your doc - they'll tell you the same....
someone's mad.
duplicate commenting needs to be resolved, seobros.
Sorry man, compliment for your post. A little question: I wa studying source of okcupid and I check some invisible content on id="footer". Why google doesn't ban it?
I'm quite interested in this too. The site mentioned uses the display:none CSS code to hide the content from the visitors, which I use quite a lot when I only want content to be displayed after a javascript trigger (mouse over/click etc). I have read here https://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/25378/display-none-tags that is acceptable as an SEO tactic but can see it being open to abuse.
I reckon this is hard for a search engine to ascertain the validity of this content as it tends to be a client side trigger that displays this content or not.
Sorry but I can't see the javascript you saw. All link inside footer id ( > ul > li > a) are not visible and didn't see behavior to show them.https://my.jetscreenshot.com/5227/20110414-qsy7-163kb
Thanks for your reply.
ps: here there's not a replies subscriptions via email?
Your right, I didn't check for javascript. Seems this code is here for the search engines only rather than for visitors.
Sorry but... that kind of behavior isn't forbidden by google? And why it's first in serp for "online dating".
Great article Rand! However, for a small business, willing to take a calculated risk, looking forward to good rankings in short period of time - if he can find a smart Grey-hat SEO who can steer him clear of punitive action by the search engines and get him better "value-for-money" rankings (for the short to mid term). My point is risk averseness and long term are important for small businesses too but isn't there some difference when juxtaposed with the bigger businesses? Would you still recommend white hat SEO for him?
Thanks for the great post, a refreshing counterpoint to the Kris's angst ridden hyperbole - such negativity is tiring to read yet I never tire of real examples and statystical analysis. Never change your style!
Rand,
In the examples that you posted.. Zappos, was one of them.. and you gave props to Adam for what they did with the keyword "buy shoes online"
I didn't really feel like looking at all 113,060,034 backlinks that Zappos has, but if you have Amazon.com, and all of the properties that Zappos has at it's disposal .. How the heck could you not rank high for any keyword you wanted?
Instead, I decided to take a look at another site that Adam is providing "White Hat SEO" for.. https://www.jpcycles.com/, which, anyone who can check their backlinks shows that they are buying links at https://www.harley-davidsonforums.com/ for "Motorcycle parts" and here https://www.motorcycle.com/ for "Motorcycle Tires".. HMM, that doesn't seem to be "White Hat SEO" to me..
In a perfect world, everyone would think like you, and all of our clients would have huge budgets to pay for my $200/hour consulting fee, but, they don't. I am not saying that it justifies buying links, but I also find it silly that potentially, JP Cycles could get a pentaly for breaking the all mighty TOS of Google. Now, does Adam have the responsibilty and right to put his client in this position? Personally, I think Google can s#ck it becasue the two links above are extremely targeted and it makes sense for them to be there, but hey, maybe those two sites just decided to throw those links up with the perfect anchor text just to be nice. ;-)
-Z
Zach - I'd be loathe to attribute any specific links to a particular SEO. It's impossible for us to know who acquired those links, when and how. I will say this, Adam's as passionate and outspoken as I am about rejecting link buying in favor of spending on white hat activities, so it would seriously surprise me if that was his work.
I am not quite sure "loathe" is the right word in that first sentence .. but, I agree that it would be fairly difficult to prove exactly how those links got there.. (unless of courese I emailed the two sites asking how much it cost to advertise in their Partners link section) ..
Do I know for 100% sure that Adam is providing SEO for Jp Cycle? No, I guess not. I found the site in their company's blog post by an employee (with that anchor text) here: https://www.audettemedia.com/blog/seo-copywriting-tips/ I figured that she wouldn't just throw those sites in there willy nilly.. but, hey, I could be wrong..
Ok, what about the other site in that blog post where the anchor text is "Pet Insurance"? Are there any questionable backlinks for that site one might wonder? Not that I could see, except (https://www.abednet.org/tag/sexuality) and unless you consider having multiple sites (owned by Kroger) in your network all linking to the page with the anchor text "Pet insurance".
FYI, if I had that network of sites, I would do the exact same thing for krogerpersonalfinance.com/pet-insurance/. But, that isn't really my argument. At the end of the day, we (SEOers) are all manipulating Google one way or another. Some worse than others, but none the less, that is the goal. Opinion starts to come into play when it comes to what is wrong or right, but that opinion is mostly steared by what Google's opinion of wrong and right is. Google wants quality sites at the top of the serps to make their users happy, and in both examples, Google and Adam win, but are his tactics considered manipulation and are they 100% in compliance with Google's TOS? The greater the relevance/quality of a manipulated/SEO'd site is, the less chance of getting the hammer.
Grey hat F@$#ing works for me and I would like to argue that maybe it does for Adam as well?
Indeed, Zach:
loath - to be reluctant
loathe - to despise something
Funny to respond to something like this... but no, those are certainly not links that AudetteMedia has purchased for JP Cycles. Feel free to reach out to me personally if you'd like to discuss more -- hit me up at https://twitter.com/audette. The JP Cycles team is very savvy with SEO and I'm sure they'd love to weigh in as well!
Hi Adam,
Like I mentioned already, there is really no way to know if they were bought or not, but you have to admit that sitewide sidebar links like the examples I provided are commonly mistaken as bought links. Especially when the link has an exact anchor text and is on a corporate type site that is fuiled by ad revenue.
That being said, are you suggesting that they are "naturally" added links that the site wanted to add? The chances that Verticalscope Inc. would be so kind to provide you a free link is almost laughable. Maybe some type of "savvy" SEO tactic was diployed to get those links? i.e. You link to me here and I will link to you here, discount on products, "fill in the blank"..
My point of the first comment was not to throw you or JP under the "Motorcycle" (even though it does look like I did), but to highlight:
"we (SEOers) are all manipulating Google one way or another. Some worse than others, but none the less, that is the goal. Opinion starts to come into play when it comes to what is wrong or right, but that opinion is mostly steared by what Google's opinion of wrong and right is. "
When people start preaching about what is wrong and right in SEO, it really starts to piss me off because even if you or JP didn't buy those links, I would like to bet the farm that some kind of "deal" was made in order to get that link there and that is technically against the rules in Google's little big world...
I definitely get your point... and it has some validity to be sure. The problem with all this is that SEO, by nature, is extremely complicated. It is not my habit to publicly comment on how links were secured for one of our clients. Things happen lots of different ways, let's just leave it at that. How the links in question were secured is really none of anyone's business except for the sites involved. If I or my team was responsible for the links, I would feel responsibility to specifically respond. As it is, those links have nothing to do with our work and were established before we began our partnership, so it's something outside of my direct control.
That said, part of our work as quality, white hat, search marketers are to clean up sketchy links in the profile. If we feel any type of link is potentially causing low-quality signals, we will certainly work to provide our client with recommendations to remedy that.
The bottom line for me is that, while I appreciate your attentiveness and respect your views, having to explain myself for some links you found in a client's profile is not a good use of my time. I'm focused on providing our clients with value and performance from SEO.
To be fair Adam, I never asked you to explain yourself, or jp.. I was merely using you and jp respectively as examples/rebuttles to this whole "white/black hat" debate that Rand posted about. Lol, this post actually made me pull the cobwebs off of my account (Apparently, I registered my account before Rand, which I don't know how that is even possible!) and login again.
Sure, SEO can be as complicated as you want it to be, but when it comes to how a couple of links are acquired?...Eh. With vague statements like "SEO, by nature, is extremely complicated" and "Things happen lots of different ways, let's just leave it at that.".. it doesn't shed much light onto the "white hat" world.
I wouldn't disclose information about how I obtained specific links either, but again, it doesn't really matter to my argument because I can substitute jp with a hundred other sites. At the end of the day, it isn't about bought links (or not bought links), but the bigger issue of who gets to decide what is right or wrong.
White Hat strategies are best applied at scale, for larger businesses, and with larger budgets, because they require either an abundant amount of time and dedication from the site owner, or a large retainer for a team of outside consultants to do the work, or both. While Rand's examples about Simply Hired is a great example about how a white hat strategy can work, SH is a huge company and I'd imagine their marketing budget is upward of six figures.
I think what Kris pointed out which Rand glossed over was for small businesses on a limited budget, applying a 'whitehat and complain' strategy, blogged about at length by some SEO vets, is not the best use of their resources.
Most SEOs who do that are not being honest with their clients that it would take some sort of miraculous intervention for that type of strategy to pay off, and that money would be better spent contracting out some low-level link-building or other "gray" hat techniques.
Fantastic post Rand! Sending it to all of my clients as this post makes a compelling summary of why companies should spend more on White Hat tactics. Thank you!
Glad I just saw your tweet linking to this post Rand.
I sincerely hope there aren't many out there who will be tempted by Kris' post to venture over to the dark side.
Can't help but feel his (Kris') post was purely self promotion.
looks like you went all out on this rant!
Excellent blog post. Really moving.
its not worth the risk to do blackhat, white hat seo is more pleasing to do.
Those of us fighting for rank in the trenches are often tempted by the dark side. I appreciate the ammunition you've provided to help hold the line.
All I can say is some good companies need a bit of grey/black whatever you want to call it to help them get better results than producing more quality blog posts could ever get them. Google rewards exact match anchors and in the real world, companies rarely get those money, high volume exact match anchors via whitehat methods. When Google start factoring in more and more real world business metrics, then spammers will have a hard time keeping up. In the mean time, if big budget companies can move up the SERPs with a bit of brute force than many will continue. I would love to do whitehat SEO for companies like Yelp or Etsy... there its really just about smart internet marketing rather than SEO. Not all companies have large communities of loyal users who just need a smart SEO strategy to help turn users into SERP movers. How would you advice a seller of generic prescription drugs to rank naturally?
I always enjoy a good debate of white hat vs black hat... the ultimate good vs evil conflict in the marketing world!
I read quite alot of articles on this site and really enjoy lots of them. This article though was brilliant, loved it!! A great mix of information, stories and thought provoking comment. Thank you for it.
Well, Kris's argumentation is probably similar to what bank robbers, pickpockets, thiefs or even prostitutes would say. It's just easy money - when you get used to it it's difficult to let go and you're inclined to think that other, honest people are just jerks, who failed to understand the true rules of this brutal world.
White, grey and black "hats" don't relate to SEO only. They are part of every discipline in life - sports, business, education. Everywhere you can cheat and look for shortcuts - or you can do it the right, "white hat" way.
But going grey or black you no longer can call yourself a professional - you're just a pest.
I'd say it's more along the lines of a flirty waitress than a prostitute.... but that's just me :)
Great post! It's kind of re-enforcing what has becone obvious to me after joining SEOMoz.... Real good quality sites and content work! I am learning this with the link building I am doing at the moment as people are happy to link to my site as it has interesting stuff on it not just trying to sell people things.
From my experiance, 95% of SEO is a scam. Credit to the few individuals and companies that are practicing it the correct way. Rarely does SEO generate a business real ROI.
Post prompted me to write detailed response to be found on this wetpaint site.
The only problem with Kri's post is that he didn't take it far enough. You can do blatant un-adulterated BH and hacking and google doesn't care. You don't believe me? This blog has been hacked and the links all the way down the bottom are from people who have pushed there backlinks into compromised pre 2.9 wordpress blogs. There are thousands of these blogs out there and you force all of them to accept your backlinks! Instant 1st page position for any keyword. Don't believe me? try it! and here is a challenge to the SEOMOZ community lets see if you can get any of the sites in the links down the bottom removed from serps by letting google know. I bet you can't! here is the link check it out yourself and no I dont own the blog and no I haven't forced my link into this particular site! https://fitnessrecessionbusterprices.com/
so why stop at Grey Hat? google doesn't care if you are Blackhat or even you are a blatant outright hacker!
I dont know why, but this article looks like a marketing blog to me. It has links to so many websites I have not heard of before. Does SEOMOZ sell links too? If this blog is influenced to give links, then is this not blackhat too? I dont know. something doesnt look right, as this article didnt really add anything to my knowledge! Sorry folks, only telling the truth.
Hi!
Just for your information: no, SEOmoz does not sell links.
And all the links you see in the post are simply citations of sources... something very natural. In fact, unnatural should be citing something and not linking to it as source.
Finally, to link to site you have not heard before is not synonym of blackhat at all. All the contrary! Be thankfull that Rand here (and many others out there) points you to new valuable blogs and site.
Excellent post!
Not only because you clearly demonstrate you are a bona-fide SME on SEO (but) most importantly (selfishly) you gave me more than enough ammo to squelch any rebuttal on why I won't use those bottom feeder outsourcing sources to augment my SEO services I charge my clients.
It took me a couple of years to get my arms around what I consider "best practices" SEO techniques. I can brag all day long about how I am on Page 1 of Google for this search term and that longtail yadda/yadda and yet, there's this other site that bests my ranking but when you peak behind the curtain, you clearly see the Wizard is Phat and Nakit.
My partner and I build World Class WordPress Websites (we even own the domain) and we provide kick butt (manual) SEO, albeit, we do need to figure out how to scale so we can do 50 sites a day v. 50 sites a week. Still, I intend to use this post as proof statements when a client says $2500 a month for SEO ain't worth it. Its not only that you get what you pay for, its QUALITY counts in the SEO space and this post goes a long way to support my argument. Strong Work!
Great response, but a bit too nice for me :) I don't see a need to be kind on this topic. Blackhat SEO might be a fine curiosity, and there might be some intelligent and otherwise decent people out there who do it, but they do it at the expense of everyone else.
I see whitehat SEO working every day. I like to think that some people either don't have the marketing skills or the patience to pull it off - so they rely on technical tricks that deliver fleeting rankings and no long term value while putting their clients at serious risk.
Rand you are a blog poet, no doubt.. good argument. And, anyone who disagrees that white hat works is retarded - and to your point, is most likely fishing for the controversy and all the benefits that come with it. White hat works, and it can work in a big way. I think this argument is silly to be honest, because white hat seo isn't only good content it's as you stated above it's a collection of best practices that are tried and true.
However; the real argument here shouldn't be does white hat work, it's when you've done (and are doing) white hat, is there room to supplement your white hat tactics with black hat voodoo. I personally think yes, and each case has it's own scenario. I also personally justify most of my black hat tactics by only performing them on sites that try to lead with value and original content (as in your examples).
I am looking foward to the day when we don't argue white hat vs black hat, but simply working tactics vs non-working tactics. If a site is ranking well, and provides no value to the user... then that's another problem that needs to be fixed all together.
Spam removes economic and brand value from the search/social/web marketing ecosystem. If you create this kind of junk, at least be honest with yourself - you're directly harming your fellow marketers, online businesses, searchers and future generations of web users.
You hit the nail on the head. Black hat SEO is incredibly unethical because it is deliberately and selfishly destructive to a system that everyone in our field depends on. Competition is key to any industry, but a competitive environment requires rules and standards. in order to sustain itself. Black hats hurt the reputation of the SEO industry, which if unchecked will drrag us all down together.
Thank you Randfor taking a stance on the issue.
Sean
Why the zeal against black hat? If it's so ineffective, there's nothing to worry about. There are no RULES when it comes to SEO...how many times do we have to go over this? If you get caught, you get banned. Know what that's called? It's called risk. Ethics only comes into play when you as a webmaster begin to manipulate the user experience in an intentionally malicious way. Doing what you can to rank higher so you get more visitors to your site is not malicious to the user.
You know, if all white hat SEO firms ranked above black hat SEO firms, there'd be no way black hatters could "hurt the reputation of the SEO industry" since they'd have no work to begin with.
Black hatters don't care about you. Get over it. They don't care about the white hat community. Get over it. They care about making money, and feeding their families (yes, they're human and have families, too).
I'm not even a black hatter, and I'd love to see white hat work for small business (my rankings would sky rocket if "build great content" was actually worth a damn). But if you're going to refute an ideology, do yourself a favor and hop off the bandwagon, think for yourself, and stop complaining like a sore loser.
Sorry, but I fundamentally disagree - aggressively manipulating rankings is, all else being equal, bad for the user experience. I'm not saying Google is the perfect judge, and I don't equate ethics with Google's rules, but if you take crap content and rank it with spammy links and other tactics, you're knowingly pushing crap on search visitors.
Search has an added problem that people can't self-regulate. It's true that, in the broader business world, you can spend a lot of money and market a lousy product, but people don't have to buy it. If people click a result and think it's crap, they don't really have a feedback mechanism. They can not buy your product, but they can't really impact the SERP. Admittedly, some of that is Google's problem, and it's where social signals will come into play.
Surely thats precisely what the +1 button that Google are introducing is going to achieve.
As more and more 'average' search users add this tag to what their experience shows to be good quality links, inexorably the poor quality ones will fall away into anonymity.
Kinda democratic, I guess :-)
Ethics only comes into play when you as a webmaster begin to manipulate the user experience in an intentionally malicious way.
I would argue that ethics are always in play when it comes to business decisions. The point I am making is that black hat tactics are by definition destructive to search engines. If trust in and quality of search engine results declines below a certain threshold, people will begin obtaining information through other means. I think it's fairly self-evident that our industry and livelihoods depend on a relatively healthy search ecosystem that returns the most relevant results.
As per my belief everything has its own importance. Both the technique white hat and black hat seo has its own values and strategies.
directory submission [link removed by keri]
This was really an excellent sermon, Rand.
At https://cathyreisenwitz.com/ we try to keep it all white hat.
/voteban
Great post, I don't like web spam too...because disturb my web.
<removed link - Jen>
Lol you can't possibly be serious. Did you just admonish spam and then spam a link in the same comment? *sigh*
:D @^ lol i noticed that *spam* link too... :P .. thats why i said i hate being naive .. specially here :D