SEO Crunch

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”

–Dr. Seuss

White Hat, Black Hat, Striped Hat

Much like Dr. Seuss characters, SEO techniques come in funny shapes and colors and most have stripes. What do we mean by this? Well, there are “pure” white hat and black hat techniques and then there are many that are “on the line”.

In this article, we will share with you some real world examples of this principle.

Purist white hatters will rely on providing their web site visitors good content and letting the search engines naturally rank their web pages over time. SEO is a secondary thought process for them and they belittle with contempt those who will pay for backlinks or otherwise try to “game” the search engines. Nothing against white hatters, but they are definitely missing out on many proven SEO techniques if they do not try to think outside the box sometimes.

Black hatters are mostly spammers and scammers. They will use easily detected spamming techniques like link farming, posting spam URLs in blog comments, spam email, and a host of other techniques to despise. Most of them know they will eventually get banned by search engines, but it must be worthwhile for them or there probably would not be so many. They aren’t worried about the longevity of their domains; they have a lot of no value, spammy sites they are working at any given time. Pity these pour souls for they have none!

Now, the third type is sometimes referred to as a gray hat, but we will refer to them as striped hatters. These are the really creative people who know how to bend all the rules and get their sites high ranking search engine results. And, in disguise like a imaginative Seuss characters, they know how to do this without getting banned!

Google the Grinch has really been cracking down hard on recently on “paid links”, with PageRank reductions and worse, in blatant cases even penalties that reduce a site to not even ranking for queries upon its own domain name! Some people surmise that this directive has emerged because paid links cut into the greedy Mr. G’s own profits, while others rightly defend Google’s desire to provide the most relevant search engine results possible; after all that’s how the firm became a household name and one of the most profitable companies in the world. There likely is at least some truth to both arguments.

Black hatters blatantly go after paid links, while white hatters will follow Mr. G’s advice and try to sell only links that use the now-famed nofollow attribute. Striped hatters, like the Cat in the Hat, are finding ever more creative ways to buy and sell links that even those brain-bigger-than-a-planet PHDs employed by Mr. G will have a pretty tough time weeding out. How could any algorithm detect the difference between a contextual and content-relevant link that has been paid for versus one that is unsolicited? We have yet to see any definitive proof that this is even possible, let alone that it is being done successfully!

It is important to remember that gray hat SEO techniques come in many shades and that the more risk one takes, the more results may be achievable. But that is a double-edged sword, since at the darker end of this blurred scale one inevitably joins the black hatters.

For instance, you can Digg your site (or use any of a vast and ever growing number of social networking sites) to get mentions of your web site. In theory, one would not argue this technique to be questionable. But in reality, there are services that allow people to buy Diggs, Stumbles, etc. and some of the largest SEO firms have vast networks they employ to Digg, Stumble, Blog, post on forums and so forth. Works great … unless you get caught, and plenty do because they are over zealous and buy these in large enough quantities and too quickly. Then, their domain is banned from said social network.

We also know that Google has stated that “news related” content can not be considered duplicate content due to the fact that many are broadly syndicated and RSS feeds are the soupe du jour. Many striped hatters closer to the dark side will take pieces of RSS feed and then “pad” this content with additional content that is contributed by users or, even more dubiously, generated by scraping comments on these stories from social networking sites and blogs and using a script to alter the text; removing or replacing words like “an”, “the”, “that” “by”, etc.

This in effect creates “new” content that will be readily indexed and produce search results. Over time, it is certain that such “content generators” will become even more sophisticated and effective, scraping the Net for related content and “reassembling” it into new and unique content.

Here’s another striped hatter technique described by Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz, called Wiki Jacking:

The important takeaway here really is the importance of using your internal anchors wisely; arguably a white hatter technique. But the creative and intelligent use of keywords within your internal links is a powerful method of funneling link power to specific pages that is questionable enough to be considered outside normal white hat techniques.

Next, good striped hatters will work out ingenious link exchanges with other sites. Instead of the dreaded direct exchange, my site A links to your site B, which links to my Site C. The more sites in your network, the greater ability you have to set up elaborate exchanges. The more related your sites are with each other, the better you will be able to set up quality indirect link exchanges using this method.

Then, there is the subject of link bait; attracting natural backlinks by creating what marketers usually call buzz. Any content you create that is good can be considered link bait. But the best link bait creates controversy, may be outrageous or even inflammatory. Good SEOs know how to use this technique shrewdly, even if it may bring some negative impact or reputation upon them. A great example would be this outrageous joust between an SEO author and webmaster forum moderator. Just look at the number of comments that were generated by this very public conflict! If you bothered to click on this link then the bait was quite effective and also the site owner has gotten another backlink here.

So, in reality there are no SEO hats; only various degrees of risk specific techniques incur. You always have to weigh the potential reward against the level of risk taken. There are many more techniques we will explore in future reports.

And that, before he scat, said the cat, is called a striped hat.

Here, we shall leave you with a funny page to go visit - Natural SEO Gods