An update on the old black hat vrs white hat SEO arguement

You are all fimiliar with Black Hat SEO right? That’s where an SEO minipulates the search engines alogrythms to boost their rankings. This is not illegal, but violates the search enginges rules for inclusion in their searches, some of which can be pretty lame and hypocritical.Anyhow, I remember hearing this saying one time “Liars are smarter then non liars because you don’t just have to rember what you said but you also have to remember who you said it too.” I think that was from a comedy, but can’t put my finger on it. The fact is that it is 98.53% on the money when it comes to SEO. Pissing off the major search enginges and is easy and its hard to know exactly where the line is that you don’t want to cross. If you plan on getting caught, and you should if you practice the dark arts of black hat seo, then you have to know how to completly change your identity. You will need a new hosting account and web address. Hoever if you get banned from Google adwords, MSN adcenter or Yahoo Search Marketing then this could be as extensive as using a different computer, hosting company, domaina name, credit card, name on a credit card and IP address. They clearly don’t like getting burned twice when internet advertising is concernted. Black hats also need to know skills like cloaking and spamming, but they need to know the most up to date methods or they will get caught right away. Bam. If you aren’t one step ahead of Google then all your efforts are for not. In fact with modern black hats its not a matter of if you will get caught but rather when you will be, so you better make enough money of your site to justify the time spent on it if you go the black hat way.

Obviously anyone who uses black hat techniques when marketing someone elses sight is a reckless fool, unless of course the person who hires said SEO knows that they are doing it in wich case they are the uniformed fool. Unless that person knows and trusts the black hat SEO and the risks involved, did I just digress?

But with great risk comes great rewards. Some markets are so competitive that the only way to get on the front pages of the search engines are to cheat (online gambling, adult sites, and viagra for example), and the SEO’s fight it out like online Samurais and ninjas. However, the learning curve is steep where black hat is concerned and their is no school you can attend to learn such dark arts. At least now ligitimate illigitamate school that I know about, I’m sure their are scammers out their who will teach you (how to get caught) for a price.

I personally would recommend anyone new to the wild west of internet marketing stick to white hat SEO, but know this as a fact. “If you walk on this side of the road, safe. If you walk on this side of the road, OK.. but if you walk down the middle, SMOOSH! just like grape!”

-Mr. Meogy, The Karate Kid (c. 1983ish)