Black Hat, White Hat, Grey Hat - This Is A Tough One
Search engine optimisation, or "Seo", has for extended periods of time been the most sought after commodity for more than one webmasters. A few years ago there really wasn't much to it, but as the Internet is expanding exponentially so does the competition - especially for any term that has money making powers.
Decided by the things you do to improve the search engine rankings of your site, it could be portrayed as white-, black- or grey hat methods. The initial one being highly touted things like writing relevant content for your site, while the black hat approach would instead be strategies that the big search engines like google, yahoo and msn are not going to like one bit - spamming other people's blogs and forums with links to your site, for example.
Not hard to guess, the grey hat methods land on the border of "appropriate and inappropriate" and are things that you could very well bring through, on condition that you use the methodology with care. For a plain vanilla webmaster distinguishing between these methods isn't every time all that effortless, specifically with so many experts offering to sell us their latest superior opinion regarding improved rankings and making money online.
If money's all that you like...
The ethics of the matter aren't maybe as easy to decide on as could be deduced either.
On the one hand it's rather clear that super seo'ed adsense sites filled with not worth mentioning content - that could equally well read "hey ha la di da" or some much the same galimatias - are of zero value to the serious Internet user, and no one likes to have their pet forum or blog spammed with barefaced plugs for super pills that promise to boost sexual potency. As the search engines make their living on serving up relevant and good as gold information, it's purely logical that they don't size up on these black hat sites and methods with compassionate eyes.
Though, the Internet is literally made up of it's users and so long as you aren't breaking any real laws, you are free to produce content in whatever manner you wish to. If your goal is to mass-produce a blog farm consisting of hundreds of blogs that has zero value to human visitors, there is naught but time and cost deterrents stopping you from doing so.
The kind of guys that do this are in it fully for the money - they rapidly mass-produce large amounts of webpages that takes into consideration specific keywords they can monetize in one way or another. The aspiration of these sites isn't to give the reader anything of value, but to get him or her to click on an ad that will take him somwhere else where he will hopefully spend some money instead.
So in a way, this is indeed nought but a marketing tactic, and some people are reportedly making a most good living employing similar strategy.
For the "more timid webmaster" though, who just want to tell folks about his pastime or wants to offer people real products and services, it's doubtlessly a good idea to steer clear of anything that could be classified as black hat search engine optimisation.
Not seeing that it is morally ambiguous, but due to the fact that it most likely will hurt his bottom line in due time.
Andreas Sundstrom has been involved in Internet marketing for over six years. On his website he reviews various SEO techniques including the latest tactics presented in project black mask.
Click the XML Icon Above to Receive SEO Articles Via RSS!
