What Color is Your Hat?
SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) are often described as White Hat or Black Hat. Black hat techniques are considered the dark side of SEO – things like cloaking, keyword stuffing, splogs and other tricks to fool search engine and users. White hat SEO consists of nothing but writing good content for users and getting natural links. Of course there are many shades of gray between white and black, and now Tim Converse has given a definition to eight different shades of SEO. Here are the shortened definitions:
Dark inky black: The SEO’s (or in this case the spammer’s) interests are totally divergent from both the engines and the users – the SEO wants to trick the search engine into handing over users who are ripe to be tricked themselves into a situation of malicious harm.
Charcoal: The SEO tries to trick the engine into showing the user something totally unrelated to the query, and possibly offensive, but doesn’t actually commit any illegal or fraudulent acts within five seconds of the first user click.
Dark gray: The SEO collects (aka steals) random text from other sites, and uses it to create thousands (or millions) of pages targeting particular queries.
Slate gray: The SEO creates thousands (or millions of pages), all of which point (by linkage, or framing, or redirection) to the same content, which might actually be interesting to the searcher.
Gray: The SEO reads the guidelines of search engines, and tries to juice up their sites just enough to fly under the radar on all dimensions – artificial linkfarms that remain small, automatic content duplication that is arguably not too abusive, etc.
Light gray: The SEO creates “original” content in bulk the old-fashioned way, thinking first of all of search engine rules, secondly of duplicate detection algorithms, and lastly of whether the text makes sense to human beings and is something anyone would ever want to read. Then the SEO experiments with all the parameters (keyword density, internal linkage) trying to move up for the queries of interest.
Off-white: The SEO ensures crawlability of the site, restructures it if necessary for size of pages and internal linkage, and then injects terms to specifically target the important keywords and queries.
White: The SEO starts (if lucky) with a site full of content you can’t find anywhere else, and that answers a need that searchers actually have.
Luminescent pearly white: This would be a case where the SEO designs a site to show up for relevant queries and not to show up for irrelevant queries.
There probably aren’t any webmaster who are luminescent pearly white or dark inky black, most of them fall somewhere in between. I tend to stay very much on the white end of the scale – I feel this is where it best to be if you are in this for the long run. I’d rather put my effort into creating sites that people actually want to link to rather than trying to stay abreast of the latest techniques to try and trick the search engines.
What color is your hat?
