SEO White Hat vs. Black Hat Search Engine Optimization Description

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White Hat verses Black Hat SEO Techniques Glossary = Be sure to use this webpage to reference whether your Webmaster is on the up and up with his/her search engine optimization tactics!

White Hat verses Black Hat SEO techniques = from the Wikipedia = SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve. The search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing. Some industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.

An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review. Infamous examples are the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. And the April 2006 removal of the PPC Agency BigMouthMedia. All three companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.

Many Web applications employ back-end systems that dynamically modify page content (both visible and meta-data) and are designed to increase page relevance to search engines based upon how past visitors reached the original page. This dynamic search engine optimization and tuning process can be (and has been) abused by criminals in the past. Exploitation of Web applications that dynamically alter themselves can be poisoned.

Cloak = The practice of delivering different content to the search engine spider than that seen by the human users. This Black Hat tactic is frowned upon by the search engines and carries a virtual death penalty of the site/domain being banned from the search engine results.

Code Swapping (bait and switch) = Changing the content after high rankings are achieved. This is another extreme Black Hat technique!

Duplicate Content = Obviously content which is similar or identical to that found on another website or page. A site may not be penalized for serving duplicate content but it will receive little if any Trust from the search engines compared to the content that the search engines considers being the original.

FFA (Free For All) = A page or site with many outgoing links to unrelated websites, containing little if any unique content. Link farms are only intended for spiders, and have little if any value to human users, and thus are ignored or penalized by the search engines. Link farms are nothing but Black Hat tactics to be avoided!

Pay For Inclusion (PFI) = The practice of charging a fee to include a website in a search engine or directory. While quite common, usually what is technically paid for is more rapid consideration to avoid Googles prohibition on paid links.

Proprietary Method (bullshit, snake oil) = Sales term often used by SEO service providers to imply that they can do something unique to achieve “Top Ten Rankings”. Avoid these people at all costs!

SMP (Social Media Poisoning) = Any of several (possibly illegal) black hat techniques designed to implicate a competitor as a spammer - For example, blog comment spamming in the name / brand of a competitor.

Sock Puppet = An online identity used to either hide a persons real identity or to establish multiple user profiles.

Spam Ad Page (SpamAd page) = A Made For Adsense/Advertisement page which uses scraped or machine generated text for content, and has no real value to users other than the slight value of the adds. Spammers sometimes create sites with hundreds of these pages.

Spamdexing = Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deceptively modifying web pages to increase the chance of them being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a dishonest manner.

Spider (Bot, Crawler) = A specialized bot used by search engines to find and add web pages to their indexes.

Splash Page = Often animated, graphics pages without significant textual content. Splash pages are intended to look flashy to humans, but without attention to SEO may look like dead ends to search engine spiders, which can only navigate through text links. Poorly executed splash pages may be bad for SEO and often a pain in the ass for users.

Splog = Spam Blog which usually contains little if any value to humans, and is often machine generated or made up of scraped content.

Search engine optimization analysis, consulting and development for small business websites in Denver, Colorado and across the USA.

Honest, organic, white hat SEO methods are required in order to achieve excellent search engine rankings.

SEO should be built into a business website from the very foundation as part of the original plans in order to be found by the search engines.

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this website was last modified on November 22, 2009