In recent years, the terms black hat and white hat and lately Green hat have been applied to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry. Black hat SEO tactics, also called spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines’ terms of service, whereas white hat methods are generally approved by the search engines.

Where does this phrase come from?

In movie, a “Black hat” was someone in a western movie (usually a villain) who would wear a black hat in contrast to the hero’s white hat. An almost perfect reference will be the popular western cowboy movie ” The Good The Bad and the Ugly.”

The Good: White Hat Methods

A white hat is the hero or good guy, especially in computing slang, where it refers to an ethical hacker or penetration tester who focuses on securing and protecting IT systems. Now in Blogging, about the Good Guy’s methods. Even the name here draws a parallel, as these techniques are classified as White Hat Search Engine Optimization. White hat methods of SEO involve following the search engines’ guidelines as to what is and what isn’t acceptable. Their advice generally is:

#Create content for the user, not the search engines.

#Make that content easily accessible to their spiders, and to not try to game the system.

Often, webmasters make critical mistakes when designing or setting up their sites, inadvertently “poisoning” them so that they will not rank well. White hat SEOs attempt to discover and correct mistakes, such as machine-unreadable menus, broken links, temporary redirects, or poor navigation structure. Because search engines are text-centric, many of the same methods that are useful for Web accessibility are also advantageous for SEO. A detailed case for this common ground, cited by the W3C with respect to Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case, is SEO—A Positive Influence on Web Accessibility . Google has brought the relationship between SEO and accessibility even closer with the release of Google Accessible Web Search which prioritises better-accessible sites. Methods exist for optimising graphical content, including ALT attributes, and adding a text caption. Even Flash animations can be optimised by designing the page to include alternative content in case the visitor cannot read Flash. Some SEO methods considered proper by the search engines:

#Using a unique and relevant title to name each page.

#Editing Web pages to replace vague wording with specific terminology relevant to the subject of the page, and which the audiences the site is developed for will expect to see on the pages, and will search with to find the page.

#Increasing the amount of unique content on the site. #Writing quality content for site visitors instead of search engines. #Using a reasonably-sized, accurate description Meta tag without excessive use of keywords, exclamation marks, or off-topic terms.

#Ensuring that all pages are accessible via anchor tag hyperlinks, and not only via Java, JavaScript or Macromedia Flash applications or meta refresh redirection; this can be done through the use of text-based links in site navigation and also via a page listing all the contents of the site (a site map).

#Allowing search engine spiders to crawl pages without having to accept session IDs or cookies. #Participating in a Web ring with other quality Web sites. #Writing useful, informative articles under a Creative Commons or other open source license, in exchange for attribution to the author by hyperlinking. These along with certain ethics determined by nothing more than common sense form the basis of a good, clean and ethical blog.

The Bad: Black Hat Methods

Black hat SEO tactics, also called spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines’ terms of service. There exist greedy folks who place too many ads and links on their page, and promote their blog by making use of certain under- handed SEO techniques. These, and more, are blanketed under the term “Black Hat Blogging.” Since we’re all Google addicts here, let’s get a closer insight into its search engine and how it works.

Firstly, Google uses an algorithm called PageRank, which does what it’s supposed to do— rank some pages over others, which appear earlier in the search results. (Technically, it’s not just the original PageRank algorithm now, but we’ll just say “PageRank” for simplicity’s sake.) PageRank analyses links available for the search engine and assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.

PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name PageRank) and Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. Search engine optimisers widely agree that the things that influence a page’s rankings include:

# Keywords in the Title tag.

# Keywords in links pointing to the page. # Keywords appearing in visible text.

# Link popularity (PageRank for Google) of the page. “Black hat” SEO are methods to try to improve rankings that are disapproved of by the search engines and/or involve deception. This can range from text that is “hidden,” as for example, text coloured similar to the background, or by redirecting users from a page that is optimised for search engines to one that is more human-friendly.

As a general rule, a method that sends a user to a page that is different from the page the search engine ranked is black hat. Search engines can and do penalise sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminat ing their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines’ algo rithms, or by a manual review of a site.

An infamous example is the February 2006 Google removal of both the BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany sites for use of decep tive practices. However, both companies quickly apologised, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list.

Spamdexing

Another such method is known as spamdexing, or search engine spamming. This is the practice of creating Web pages that will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a site or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned. “Google bombing” is another form of search engine result manipulation, which involves placing hyperlinks that directly affect the rank of other sites. Some blogs are created for monetising the site using advertising programs such as Google AdSense. Such“Made for AdSense” (MFA) blogs have no redeeming value except to get visitors to the site for the sole purpose of clicking on advertise ments.

MFA sites are considered to be spamming search engines and providing surfers with less-than-satisfactory search results. These types of sites are being eliminated in various search engines, and sometimes show up as supplemental results instead of being displayed in the main results.

The Ugly: Green Hat Methods
We wonder if there is any debate that has a real unanimous conclusion no matter what the topic is, here is one such argument which balances both sides of this Ethical Blogging coin. This community calls itself Green Hat Bloggers, and claim to be make the balancing act between the Good and the Evil. Well-known blogger Jason Golod’s take on this is to be found at www.golod.com/2005/12/white-hat-black-hat-how-about-green-hat/.

 

Common Sense

It wasn’t long ago that bloggers and money had nothing to do with each other. But as the blogosphere exploded into the public consciousness over the past year—blog search engine PubSub estimates there are more than 8 million blogs—it was inevitable that the captains of commerce would latch onto this increasingly popular form of personal media.

Ads + Content = Green Hat

Black hat, White hat, or Green hat… you don’t even need to understand these terms, strictly speaking. Just use common sense! If you’re thinking about making a career out of blogging, the best way to ensure a steady revenue stream is by building a solid reputation. Remember, there are no shortcuts!

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