What Hat Do You Wear?

[Roman]

Search Engine Optimizers can wear many different hats. The color of their hat is determined by their philosophy and methods they use to optimize websites. As an affiliate, it's important to understand what's black, what's white, and what's gray, and to understand the risk versus the rewards for each approach.

Black Hat SEO
Also known as search engine spamming, is when someone creates web pages that have little or no value, that are intended to trick the search engines into offering irrelevant, redundant, or low-quality search results. Black Hat SEO's disregard the rules and the goals of the search engines in an attempt to lure visitors to their website through deceptive practices. They often take pride in gaming or outsmarting the search engines. They heavily leverage technology and automation in order to create tons of poor-quality pages, and gain inbound links from other websites. Once the visitor has arrived at their site, they will often use some kind of cloaking or redirect to a page. This is all about getting fast results. The method they use to optimize their websites will often propel them to the top of the search results very rapidly, but when the search engines catch-on, their website crash and burn. This is of little consequence to many Black Hat SEO's as they can easily reproduce their results with a new website.

White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO's focus on building quality content first and search engine optimization second. They like to play by the rules and tend to stay away from techniques that would jeopardize their website's search engine listing. They may use technology and automation to build their websites too, but they use it to accomplish different goals. They write content for people, not search engines. They tend to rely more on their copyrighting and marketing skills to achieve a top ranking, rather that automated programs.They understand that good search engine rankings take time and don't try to rush results. They are able to get more inbound links from other websites because their content is considered valuable. When you use White Hat SEO tactics you run absolutely no risk of being banned by the search engines. Visitors who come to your website will also be more likely to convert.

Gray Hat SEO
Most SEO's fall into the Gray Hat category. There are many shades of gray. Some Gray HAT SEO's tend to use more questionable tactics and take greater risk. Other Gray Hat SEO's may not do anything controversial, but may place more emphasis on optimization over content. Gray Hat search engine optimization is all about risk vs. reward. They are a hybrid between white and black SEO's. They usually do not "hack" for personal gain or have malicious intentions, but may or may not occasionally commit "trickery" during the course of their technological exploits.

[BenjArriola]

I wear them all.

Depending on who I am doing SEO for and most of my Blackhat stuff are not for SEO client sites but for personal experiments for R&D for you to get a better understanding of SEO. But I do not abuse it for fooling searching engines. Only for self discovery on how search engine work.

[market]

I think that the worst black hat tactic is using an innocently related keywords to deliver traffic to adult websites. This deceives the users and pollutes the index. Google is trying to improve its algorithms to eliminate this sort of behavior but it does still happen.

[BenjArriola]

I think the worst blackhat tactic is cloaking by IP backed up by cloaking by user-agent, then further backed up by cloaking by CSS.

That's a 3 point hiding content. Now whatever people do to it, hide links for self gain, hide links to pull competitors down using irrelevant content, do duplicate content to pull down competitors, show content of a high ranking site so your ranking increases, whatever creativeness you can think of, the limits are endless.

[Roman]

Originally Posted by BenjArriola

I think the worst blackhat tactic is cloaking by IP backed up by cloaking by user-agent, then further backed up by cloaking by CSS.

Hello Benj!

It's my first time to hear about this...it's great to hear from someone who is an authority on this...I would like to hear more of your SEO stuff, Benj!

[greenfox]

Originally Posted by Roman

Hello Benj!

It's my first time to hear about this...it's great to hear from someone who is an authority on this...I would like to hear more of your SEO stuff, Benj!

Benj is indeed good on SEO!...SUPER!....you really could learn a lot from him...in fact he just won a car on one international SEO contest..this guy is the MANN and im happy his proud to be pinoy.....Philippines Reprezent!\m/^_^\m/

[BenjArriola]

Originally Posted by Roman

Hello Benj!

It's my first time to hear about this...it's great to hear from someone who is an authority on this...I would like to hear more of your SEO stuff, Benj!

No need to find out these stuff.

Stay white, stay bright. Once your black, there is no turning back.
- Benj Arriola

[BenjArriola]

Originally Posted by greenfox

Benj is indeed good on SEO!...SUPER!....you really could learn a lot from him...in fact he just won a car on one international SEO contest..this guy is the MANN and im happy his proud to be pinoy.....Philippines Reprezent!\m/^_^\m/

Salamat (Thanks)

So just how many SEOPH people are here? Don't answer my question. It's Off topic. This can go in a new thread in the proper forum area.

[imroanne]

I believe there's a few. Although, I also believe this forum will soon be recognized SEOs and non-SEOs alike in the Philippines. :P