Session: Black Hat, White Hat. Playing Dirty with SEO.

August 21, 2008 – 12:16 am




None of the people on the panel had anything prepared, so this session was purely intended to be an open discussion/debate about the white/black hat issue. As it turned out, this was an idea format, and we got some very candid insights into the thought processes of a handful of the best SEO minds in the industry.

For the purpose of this post, George will be black hat and Drew will be white hat. We will present each of the major issues that arose during this session and play devil’s advocate for each of our sides’ stances.

George: There are so many ways to start this post. So let’s go with the most fun way: Each of the five panelists were beating around the bush trying to define the hats, or at least describe how they fit into one of the two (or three, technically). To paraphrase what Greg Boser finally blurted out, “If you’re not blackhat, that just means you’re an SEO with no game.”

Drew: It’s pretty unfair to say that a white hat SEO has no game. We simply play by the rules. And, of course, those rules are made by the search engines. To be fair, we are working for the client (that’s who is paying us after all) not the search engines. This is often the rationale that black hats give for crossing over to the other side of the search engines’ terms of service. But remember that ultimately we are beholden to the search engines for our rankings and subsequent success. As far as I’m concerned, my client’s success or failure has to do with little more than thier ability to rank well. If we risk their getting banned or black listed, we have failed.

George: Everyone is in agreement on this topic. Don’t put your clients’ brand at risk. However, there are strategies to mesh the black and white hats together for a brand client. We’ve seen case after case where a brand site is incapable of ranking for numerous head terms.

Let’s say a client can profit enormously from 10-20 head terms; they’re probably only going to get significant traffic from a small percentage of them.

So what’s the strategy for monetizing the remainder of the head terms? Create a faux affiliate network and optimize the affiliate sites for the remainder of the head terms! It was said over and over today: “Divide and conquer.”

The affiliate sites aren’t tied to the brand, just to the monetization. So black hat wins! If an affiliate site gets penalized or banned, simply rearrange the content and start over from scratch with a new affiliate optimized for the key word(s). At this point, we already know how to optimize! We already know who to buy our links from! We already have the general strategy, it’s simply re-implementation in a manner that will evade the predatory eyes of the competitors.

If we really want to take the “divide and conquer” strategy to heart, we can try to completely own the front page of Google for the keywords with a large number of different web sites. So, as long as each affiliate site is “unique”, all of the significant organic traffic can be owned. This would also lend well to multi-variate testing and CPO; each “affiliate” site can be a test bed for something new. This gives us a lot of options.

Drew: Well, let’s cut to the chase then. By and large, linking is what is causing this whole argument, right? I mean, if linking were taken out of the equation, there would be no such think as white/black hat.

George: Everyone mostly agrees on this, too. There are certainly non-linking black hat tactics, but linking is the area where the majority of black hats differentiate themselves from white hat outfits. While Bruce Clay was discussing his strategy to rank a client over a period of three years of site/content optimization and organic link building, David Naylor quickly jumped in to say he could attain the same rankings in 30 days with link purchasing.

Drew: Another important point. As SEOs, we have two choices: rank fast (30 days) or rank properly according to Google, which could take up to 3 years - sometimes more. I have a hard time with this one. On one hand, I would never NEVER put my client’s site in any kind of jeopardy. But on the other hand, delivering immediate results is highly beneficial - not to me, but to my client. Obviously, I get paid sooner, but this isn’t what I’m talking about. If I can get my client to rank very quickly then I’ve achieved my goal… but at what price? So the big question here is, “how is this done?” And the answer is buying links. Google and their nerd extraordinare, Matt Cutts, have said time and time again (more vocally each day it seems), paid links are worse than STDs. But no white hat can argue that paid links work. Many times, I have debated with my collegues about what exactly paid linking is. Here is an ambiguous example. If I have a ecomm client who sells model rocket kits, and I find a college model rocket enthusiast club on the web, I will probably approach them for a link, being and .edu and all. If they say “no” I’ll probably offer to pay them. They probably need the money (I hear college kids sell their plasma for beer). Is this bad? Everyone benefits and the end user AND my client end up with what they need. But as a white hat SEO, I will typically shy away from this behavior. And the bottom line here is that Google makes all their money from paid links, right? I mean, after all, what is Adwords?

George: How can a paid link possibly be considered “black hat” if the purpose of paying for that link is to drive traffic to your site? Right? Paying Google for Adwords is no different than paying XXX.com for a link that is going to drive valuable, relevant visitors to your site to see your product that they want to buy.

Right?

It’s paying for links strictly to manipulate PageRank that Google considers “black hat”. But that’s still the game. The traffic driving pay-links are great for conversions if you find the right partner, and Google shouldn’t penalize you for that.

If Google is all about “user satisfaction”, then to paraphrase Todd Friesen, “When I rank #1 for Viagra, and a user finds me on Google, and they buy Viagra and receive it in 2 days, how is that a bad user experience? The user is happy! They got exactly what they wanted! That’s what Google says their intent is with user experience!”

He also mentioned that he was asked to speak at a Commission Junction summit years ago, and when he walked up to the stage, he basically stated, “Look, I haven’t read your terms of service, I’m not going to, and I’m going to do this however I want to. I’m going to make money, and I’m going to make money for the company I’m pushing business to, so tell me whatever rules you want me to follow but I don’t give a shit.”

And he said there were a line of people out the door that wanted him to pimp their products after his presentation was over. So much for white hat.

Drew: Not so fast. White hat is ultimately good for the user experience over time. And if being SEOs for a long time has told us anything, it’s that gaming the search engines never works for long. Back in the old days, black hats could meta-keyword-stuff porn pages’ keyword tags with phrases like “Mickey Mouse” and it would work because back then nobody cared about conversions (of course, Google didn’t even exist back then). Page-views were king, and anything that got you the page-views was considered a win. But that stopped working after a while. So in today’s SEO game, what is legit? It’s a hard question to answer, but according to Jill Whalen, staying within the boundaries is just common sense. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to call bullshit on a fellow white hat. The “I know it when I see it approach” won’t fly. But at the same time, I think most SEOs can honestly say that they know full well when they are being black hat. Todd Friesen suggested, if Matt Cutts were to walk up behind you while you were working on a client’s SEO, would you immediately shut your laptop closed? If so, I think you have your answer.

George: Fair enough. One of the most interesting points was made by Boser and Naylon when the BMW Google ban came up. Is anyone really going to walk into a BMW dealer and say, “Look, I’m going across the street to buy a Porsche because of some javascript redirect bullshit you pulled in Germany!”

No. BMW is going to be fine, and their ban was for a very short amount of time.

And this leads to the defining point in the black/white hat debate: in reality, there are SO many SEOs that suck, and they’re the huge problem. They mess things up for everyone. If you’re a good SEO and you know how to game the system, that means you’re not going to get caught — unless, as Greg Boser so eloquently put it in the previous session, “Some idiot posted it on a blog” (he he).

………………..

There are a lot of rambling thoughts that I’ll post on this session (and the session before it — “SEO Rehab and Intervention”, which was also fantastic for the accelerated newcomer) when I have a little more time tomorrow. There was so much genius that was subtly revealed this afternoon, and it was funny that the vast majority of the follow-up questions in the Q&A were dumbed down link-purchasing questions or egotistic black/white hat arguments.

The black/white hat debate rages, and it probably will until it’s irrelevant (read: a long time from now). I’ll leave you with one important notion from the black hats: they understand the competitive landscape of their clients, and if black hat techniques are required, they know that’s how to compete in the specific space. So if you want to be white hat, take Jill Whalen’s approach and stick to clients that can rule their vertical with playing the game.

=george &
-Drew

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  1. One Response to “Session: Black Hat, White Hat. Playing Dirty with SEO.”

  2. Affiliate strategy is too slow a process…….I dont know how it works ;)

    By ankit123 on Aug 21, 2008

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