White Hat and Black Hat SEO

As discussed in Google and SEO, the essence of SEO is showing Google that your site is better quality and relevance that competing sites. When doing this, one needs to be aware that (with an extremely small number of exceptions), the site evaluations and rankings are not done by people but are done by specialized software written by Google. So, convincing Google of the quality of your site is not a matter of convincing a person (or group of people) but rather of convincing software machines. These software machines are constantly scanning the internet to re-evaluate existing sites and to find new sites. Consequently, as you change and expand your website, the Google software will see these changes and re-rank your website relevant to other websites.

The software evaluates your site against several hundred criteria, a few examples of which are:

• Links. If many sites link to your site, this is an indication that the internet community finds your site useful. Google looks at each link to your site as a vote for your site and ranks your site higher accordingly.

• Text. Suppose the purpose of your site is to sell property in New York. You may have a number of pages on your site which provide relevant information, in which the words "property" and "New York" occur. The search engine software remembers that these words occur on your site, so if someone searches for "property New York", your site will be considered. However, if the person searches for "real estate New York", your site will likely not come up unless the words "real estate" also occur on your site. The reason for this is that people know "property" and "real estate" are the same thing, but the search engine software doesn't really know this. So if you want to be found by the search engines for certain words, these words should occur somewhere on your site.

• Size. Large sites tend to rank higher than small sites. The logic is simple: it is more likely that a site with a thousand pages is an authority in its area than a site with only 10 pages.

• Design. A well-designed website tends to rank higher than one full of spelling errors and software errors.

These are of course just a few of the hundreds of different criteria.  A knowledge of the criteria can be used to obtain a good ranking in Google. For example, as explained above, if you want to rank for "property New York", you need to ensure that these terms occur on your site. If you know that some people use "real estate" or "houses" instead of "property", then you should use these terms as well somewhere on your site if you want to rank for them as well.

There are two main approaches to how one uses this knowledge to obtain good rankings, which are known among SEO professionals as:

• White Hat. White hat SEO is recognizing what Google's quality criteria are and working to meet these criteria. For example, if writing about a subject, using a variety of different terms (property, houses, real estate) within the text rather than always using the same term. Likewise, ensuring that your site provides full and useful information about the topic and ensuring that your site is free of software errors.

• Black Hat. Black hat SEO consists of trying to fool Google into thinking you have a quality site rather than actually providing a quality site. For example, when people discovered that large websites did better than small websites, some people used a software package to automatically generate thousands of pages. The pages were just a string of random words, but initially the Google software was fooled into thinking that the sites had added thousands of pages of useful information, and consequently initially gave these sites better rankings.

• The terms White Hat and Black Hat come from 1950s cowboy movies, where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black ones. This reflects the generally honest approach of the former who try to obtain good rankings through developing quality websites and the comparatively dishonest approach of the latter, who try to obtain good rankings through fooling the Google software.

The advantage of black hat SEO is that it tends to be relatively quick and cheap. Skilled black hat professionals can often jump a minor site to top rankings in a very short time. However, when this occurs, the quality of the Google search results is reduced as it is showing poor quality sites ahead of high quality. The Google corporation recognizes that this reduces the value of the Google search engine, with a resulting reduction in users and associated advertising revenue. They counter this threat to their corporate performance in several ways:

• Search Engine Evolution. To help prevent black hat SEO, the Google software is constantly being improved to be able to distinguish between websites which are truly quality websites and websites that try to give this impression through black hat SEO techniques. As such, black hat techniques may work a day or may work several months, but eventually Google tends to detect them and reduce the black hat websites accordingly. Consequently, while black hat SEO can give quick benefits, the benefits are not as long term as white hat SEO.

• Secrecy. Although a number of the main search engine criteria are known, most of the several hundred criteria are a secret. Likewise, the way in which the criteria is evaluated and the relevant importance of them are also secrets. Google rightly recognizes that by keeping this information a secret, it makes black hat abuse much more difficult.

• Punishment. When Google detects black hat SEO, it can punish the sites in terms of search rankings. Consider the case of someone who has reached position 10 for "New York property" and then decides to use some black hat SEO to try and move up a few positions. If Google detects this, rather than moving the website back to position 10, they may move it to position 20. They might go even farther and completely ban the website from current and future search engine results. If sufficiently annoyed, they could trace the website owner and ban all current and future websites registered to that person from ever appearing in their search results.

For these reasons, people who have invested in quality websites and obtained good rankings tend to stick with white hat SEO as they do not want to risk their valuable sites by using black hat SEO. Alternatively, there are a number of skilled black hat SEO experts who will get quickly get a site to top rankings for a few months, make some fast money, then shut the site down. There are also a fair number of SEO experts who occupy a gray area between the two. In any case, if you are hiring SEO expertise, check that their approach matches your business objectives.

Although we personally favor white hat SEO as providing longer term benefit, one should recognize that it takes time and effort to produce a quality website. Much of this investment is by the website owner, who needs to ensure his/her website contains useful and substantial information, which justifies Google giving it a top ranking. This investment in time by the website owner should be complimented by advice from a SEO professional on how to ensure that Google recognizes this investment.