Is it me, or have white hat techniques gone down the drain lately? Let’s say my site deals in Widgeting (as a service). The top 10 sites for my target keywords are all awful pages with no structure. For the keywords Corporate Widgeting & Widgeting Services the top site doesn't even have both words in its title. I go to the page and there are no H1 tags. Nothing. and Keyword density is VERY low. Now, before you all shout out about linking, I've checked backlinking and the keywords are not in linking text. I'm coming to the conclusion that, although i've always being an advocate for white hat techniques, it simply doesn’t work any more. I like my pages to have good structure (H1 tags..etc) but at this point i really can’t afford the lost traffic. It's almost as if G has implemented an Over Optimization filter.

if whitehat techniques, which i abandonded well over a year ago, were at all effective, this forum would not exist.

i don't know when the rest of the world is going to catch on to this.

maybe all the other blackhats are too busy counting their money to post about how unfair the search engines are!

Is it me, or have white hat techniques gone down the drain lately?White hat still works just fine, and Google is not the only search engine in town. Yahoo and MSN love white hat sites if they're relevant and well optimized.

we've got plenty of white-hatted sites still ranking fine in Google. This forum does just fine with all kinds of hats, thank you very much. :rolleyes:

Every single site I've ever done is WH, and they are doing quite well, thank you, (including one of the largest internet pharmacies). And I sleep well knowing that I've minimized the risks for my clients as much as possible while doing it.

Ian

I was merely trying to illustrate that it might be a good idea to actually remove some of the "logical" and structural elements to avoid a (possible) Over Optimization Filter. Further more, i wanted to highlight how absurd the whole situation is: Google is penalizing for doing things in the right way. Obviously, they are doing this to keep their SERPs relevant and not cluttered with spam; at this point, it seems as if this is a typical cat and mouse game.
And yes, i know there are other search engines like Yahoo and MSN, but let’s be realistic. I don't give a dam about those engines. And looking at my log files, it seems as if 93% of my customers don't either.

White hat has been extremely profitable for me lately.

Your log files don't tell you who buys. ;) Only where they came from! :)

WH working wonders for me and all my clients.

Blackhat is kicking butts :)

DaveN

maybe all the other blackhats are too busy counting their money to post about how unfair the search engines are!
Or maybe they are too busy trying to recover from the losses, when their sites have been suddenly filtered off from Google... :p

And yes, i know there are other search engines like Yahoo and MSN, but let’s be realistic. I don't give a dam about those engines. And looking at my log files, it seems as if 93% of my customers don't either.

Maybe if those sites were optimized a little better, you'd be getting traffic from more than just one site. :D

There's a lot of search traffic out there, and it ain't all Google.

Although it has always been debated what exactly are white hat and black hat techniques, what I consider and practice to be white hat is working great for our clients. Of course many black hatters will testify to the same thing.

I think that if your marketing strategy is smart and well thought out, it can work either way. The opposite is also true in that if you do not develop a well-planned and strategic optimization campaign, it will struggle or fail no matter what color hat you try to put on.

All our WH SEO techniques are performing quite well on the top 5 engines. Don't see any problems with over optimization either.

Google is penalizing for doing things in the right way.
Cute, but, ah... no.

>Every single site I've ever done is WH, and they are doing quite well, thank you, (including one of the largest internet pharmacies)

With respect I think you will find most of the playas in that keyword space moved on some time ago. It may just be me but it seems that our comrades who find guidelines hard to comply with find complaince with the law more natural.

Google is penalizing for doing things in the right way.

Somehow I can't see where you came up with that statement. Maybe you should consider the realm of requirements for G placement. Afterall, unless you work for G, I highly doubt you know for sure what is going on in the alg. It sounds to me IMO that you are concentrating on one or two possible characteristics in the alg. Just keep in mind that there are so many different characteristcs and don't forget about the big update G just went through. Word from some of folks at G say, that one won't calm down completely until the end of the summer.

I think I agree though. We have always used white hat but are no longer competitive.

Somehow I can't see where you came up with that statement. Maybe you should consider the realm of requirements for G placement. Afterall, unless you work for G, I highly doubt you know for sure what is going on in the alg. It sounds to me IMO that you are concentrating on one or two possible characteristics in the alg. Just keep in mind that there are so many different characteristcs and don't forget about the big update G just went through. Word from some of folks at G say, that one won't calm down completely until the end of the summer.

If you have a pipeline into Google then perhaps you know something that others don't, but what I see is that the current Google SERPs have dropped many relevant sites who have not used blackhat techniques out of the top 100 rankings and replaced them with less than relevant sites. Its not the first time that Google have messed up big time with a new update.

Yes don't know what they have done but our site has always prided itself on being honest and informative but we are just no where in the rankings now.

All I'm saying is look at the full picture not just a piece of the puzzle. There has to be something that no one is looking at. Obviously I don't know your stats or records, but in my experience many people who think they are doing everything whitehat find out through research that they are accidentally implementing a few black hat tricks. I use the research I have.. the experience I have... and use white seo. Even just into this most recent update 98% of my clientele have seen major increases in the SERP's. So... one would ask the question: If it is true that G is punishing white hats.. then why are they seeing such high results when using tactics suggested by reports from G and the other SE's?

That's all I ask.. look at the whole piece of the pie. As I tell my clients everyday.. you can't assume anything with the SERP's. There has to be a reason and it is usually found hidden in the background but it must be true for ALL cases in order for it to stand alone as fact.

I go to the page and there are no H1 tags.

When did H1 tags become an SEO technique?

As far as I know, those are something to do with page design and structure not rankings. Not surprising that high ranking pages aren't using them.

Call themwhat you will but they do seem to help with rankings.

Google is penalizing for doing things in the right way.
Cute, but, ah... no.
it is unfortunately rather common. see the recent thread Scraper Site Question (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=6249)
When did H1 tags become an SEO technique?

As far as I know, those are something to do with page design and structure not rankings. Not surprising that high ranking pages aren't using them.
um, if you don't structure the data properly is there such a thing as on-the-page SEO?

um, if you don't structure the data properly is there such a thing as on-the-page SEO?

Don't really understand the question, but yeah, you can of course optimize pages without using H tags. They may not be necessary nor fit in with the particular design or page structure of your site. Luckily, it won't negatively effect your rankings.

you can of course optimize pages without using H tags. They may not be necessary nor fit in with the particular design or page structure of your site.
you can do SEO without even having a page there
http://www.seobook.com/images/no-page-1.gif
http://www.seobook.com/images/no-page-2.gif
but SEO is all about achieving optimal returns.
Luckily, it won't negatively effect your rankings.
so you are saying no matter how the code of a page is marked up it will have no effect on how the page ranks?

so you are saying no matter how the code of a page is marked up it will have no effect on how the page ranks?

For the most part, that is correct.

I wouldn't say it absolutely as nothing is quite that black and white, but yeah, for the most part, the code on the page won't have much (if any) effect on search engine rankings.

But again, everything on a site and off of a site factors in together one way or another, so although generally the code won't have any effect, if you take certain aspects of the code with other factors that may be in play, you never know what you might get.

Kinda like mixing different chemicals. Might create a whole new chemical reaction!

I'd say a good marketing plan is a good marketing plan, whether you are using black, white, purple, or teal techniques. Regardless of the technique you use, you can implement it well, or you can implement it sloppy and miss the details.

Effective work comes in a lot of colors.

Personally, I can't say I've seen any significant ranking changes in the sites I work with.

When did H1 tags become an SEO technique?What an incredible question from someone who has been around so long. The H tags have been an seo technique since long before Google showed up, and it still is. Also, the html *does* affect the rankings, and it always did. Google stated that very clearly at the beginning, and there's no reason that I'm aware of to suppose that it has changed.

Google is penalizing for doing things in the right way.Google isn't penalising in this update as far as we know - at least not in the sense that we normally thing of penalties. They've made some significant changes to the algorithm, and, in doing it, they made a bit of a mess of the serps, so that their relevancy is greatly reduced. Already, I see things moving the other way, and I'm sure there is a fair way to go yet before they are done with this update.

NoMass, I suggest that you sit it out and see what things look like after the update is all done and dusted. Stick to white hat techniques because they will continue to work. Black hat stuff is only necessary when there is a good deal of comepetition, but for many, perhaps most, searchterms, white hat does just fine.

...the code on the page won't have much (if any) effect on search engine rankings.

Not to pick on Jill, whom I have tremendous respect for, but I recently saw a site that was ranking highly for some fairly competitive keywords based almost entirely on massively keyword overstuffed image alt tags.

I think a lot of old-school black hattery still works a lot better than most people give it credit for.

Of course, I imagine that the non-stop paranoia that one of your competitors might file a spam report on you can get old pretty fast, too.

Blackhat techniques only work if you know what you are doing. Most importantly blackhat works when you know how far you can go with it.

Hx tags are like Jill says not crucial. I think they've gone the way of the meta tags, they really don't weigh that much any more in Google.

> I think a lot of old-school black hattery still works a lot better than most people give it credit for.

Yes, indeed it does - especially if you work outside the main focus of the major engines (less crowded verticals and markets)

Hx tags are not crucial, but nobody suggested that they were. However, you can't write things off just because some significant time has elapsed. Google stated very clearly that they store the weight given to words on a page as compared with other words on the page. H tags, bold, strong, and font sizes, are all on page weightings that were stored by Google for ranking purposes when they began, and, to the best of my knowledge, there's no reason to suppose that they don't still store and use that data.

Everybody still goes around saying that Google uses over 100 ranking factors, but there wouldn't be many left to use if they threw loads of them out just because they've been used for a few years ;)

for the most part, the code on the page won't have much (if any) effect on search engine rankings.
Don't really understand the question

Thats clear. I'm just surprised to read this here.

I find it amazing that the issue of <H1> - <Hn> should even begin to be questioned as relevant to ranking.

By golly, some noted guru with a wildly popular newsletter told a former client of mine (who I fired - LOL) - that her pages weren't ranking because they didn't have an <H1) - when indeed they had an <H2> which was *working* better at the time - and the reason the page, formerly #1-#5 for the primary keywords for ages, had indeed been kicked out of the engines because the CLIENT FROM HELL had spammed the engines on their own without informing their SEO what they had done to "improve their exposure."

By God, it's been conventional wisdom for AGES that HTML factors, including H1-H3 are among the factors looked at for ranking - else what else is there except link spamming, for mercy's sake? Aren't HTML and on-page factors the whole basis of SEO copywriting, or did that go by the wayside along with keyword stuffing and LinkBuddies 8 years ago?

Please note the date of this paper, dear people:

What is a Tall Poppy Among Web Pages? (http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~lloyd/tilde/InterNet/Search/1998_WWW7.html)

back to the original question, imho I do think a lot of WH sites are suffering at the moment, not because WH itself doesn't work, but because the gap between BH and WH has closed.

Before I get screamed at by all hats let me explain :) - as the number of blogs and the way they naturally daisy-chain has risen it's become common for any site which is suddenly newsworthy to gain a lot of links very quickly - that's outside ofyour control and you can be as WH as you like and unable to stop it. Traditional type marketing techniques also tend to create 'unnatural' peaks in visits and links to a site, and a lot of 'non seo' activities like press releases, viral campaigns, forum memberships etc are now being mimicked by BHatters (or to be fair by less talented BHatters who make it obvious what they're doing.....)

Meanwhile BH has got cleverer and harder to detect (except for sites where no one cares if they get dumped)

Added to that we have the 'intent' argument which demonstrates exactly how hard it is to say whether a site is BH or WH - and anyone who's ever designed a system knows how hard it is to turn a subjective human decision into a list of 'yes/no' instructions for a program.

So given the amount of spam around of course each time the algo is tightened WH sites are going to get hit - Google has even said (at WMW? I read it somewhere) that if your site gets hit unfairly then you should tell them and they'll try and address it in the next algo change. I know of totally un-seo'd sites which have dropped rankings (and in theory those are the ones Google should want up top if they're relevant - they do things as if the SE's didn't exist and look where it gets them :) )

Saying you only care about ranking on Google is dangerous - in some markets most of the SE traffic and business will come from Google because of the demographic but to be honest you have to plan so that if Google switched off tomorrow you'd still have a living. However WH you may be I wouldn't trust any of the SE's to be your friend.

Gurtie, I can't give you rep again until I spread some more around, but I have to say that yours are some of the most intelligent, common sense, truly valuable posts I've ever seen in all my many years of being around forums.

because the gap between BH and WH has closed.


I am not sure I agree on that. I just think that the most advanced BH stuff is now so advanced that most people don't even see it :)

WH sites has always been hit by algo changes - just like any site can. In fact, most of the time it dosen't seem to me that engines really care that much about BH versus WH - they just care about results and user experience. If a true BH site creates good user experience and dosen't screw up search results they usually leave it and move on to some "real" problems. Thats at least my experience.

However WH you may be I wouldn't trust any of the SE's to be your friend.It's been a common misconception all along that search engines are happy with whitehat SEO - they are not. They are not happy with any serious attempt to manipulate the rankings, except that they really would like people to make proper use of the Title tag because it helps them to identify what a page is about, and they really would like decent copy and navigation because it helps them.

According to Google:-

Many SEOs provide useful services for website owners, from writing copy to giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be submitted.None of that is what any SEO thinks of as seo. Yes, we make sure that spiders can crawl the important pages, but that's not seo, and, yes, we modify the copy, but not in the way that Google implies. At best, that's just the very beginning of seo.

Search engines have never been the "friends" of website owners, or of SEOs, regardless of hat colour, and they probably never will be. They no doubt prefer white to black, but they do not like or want either.

They no doubt prefer white to black, but they do not like or want either.

Thats is absulutely not the experience I have - and I have that experience from both being an SEO and previously the manager of Scandinavians largest search engine in Denmark. Both sides on the fence.

As a manager of the search engine I did in fact have a very possitive relationship with most SEOs and I was happy to help out with their basic optimization needs in forms of writings, email response and conference presentations. I actually did enjoy the fact that much SEO actually helped our engine find and rank stuff that we would otherwise not have found or been able to rank.

I personally know of many current SE reps that do not hate SEOs at all and have lots of respect for what we do. I am full of respect for what they doo too. They may not allways agree with all we do but the ones I am talking about definately see the value of good SEO. BH or WH is not really the issue - the goals are.

That's not the same thing, Mikkel. There are se reps in the forums, and at conferences, who are perfectly friendly as people, and, when it doesn't compromise their engines, they can be quite helpful too. But it doesn't mean that the engines (the companies) are perfectly content to have people manipulate their rankings. I honestly don't think that you will find any search engine employee (or owner) of sigificance who will agree that manipulating their rankings is acceptable to them. They know it happens, and they can't (yet) prevent it, so they have to put up with some of it, but that's as far as it goes, imo. SEOs and search engines are not on the same side.

I honestly don't think that you will find any search engine employee (or owner) of sigificance who will agree that manipulating their rankings is acceptable to them. They know it happens, and they can't (yet) prevent it, Truthfully, is there REALLY any such thing as SEO that doesn't manipulate to rank well in the engines?

Is non-manipulative SEO possible, or is it just a self-delusion some have themselves under for their own sense of moral justification?

Is non-manipulative SEO possible, or is it just a self-delusion some have themselves under for their own sense of moral justification?
that quote is probably T Shirt worthy :cool:

op·ti·mi·za·tion (ŏp'tə-mĭ-zā'shən) pronunciation
n.

The procedure or procedures used to make a system or design as effective or functional as possible, especially the mathematical techniques involved.

ma·nip·u·late (mə-nĭp'yə-lāt') pronunciation
tr.v., -lat·ed, -lat·ing, -lates.

1. To move, arrange, operate, or control by the hands or by mechanical means, especially in a skillful manner: She manipulated the lights to get just the effect she wanted.
2. To influence or manage shrewdly or deviously: He manipulated public opinion in his favor.

SEOptimization = manipulation

I think SE owners must have a pretty mixed view of SEO.

I think SE owners must have a pretty mixed view of SEO.Quite possibly, regardless of what hat color any of us *think* we wear, our endeavors are probably, to them, about as palatable and tasty as drinking straight lemon juice with a bad case of trench mouth.

I like straight lemon juice. It's not the taste of it itself, but the sweet taste that follows :)

No, there is no such thing as seo that doesn't attempt to manipulate the rankings, and I don't believe that there is any search engine that finds it acceptable - except those tiny things like using the Title properly, writing informative content, and making sure that the important pages can be crawled, but that's not real seo.

I would go further and say that there is no such thing as "whitehat" seo from the engines' point of view - except for those little things that I mentioned.

I would go further and say that there is no such thing as "whitehat" seo from the engines' point of view - except for those little things that I mentioned.

Actually I think there is lot of SEO done around that engines consider "safe" or WH - even of some of it might be BH to us. Sounds confusing? Sure is. Just look at the NPR case as Danny descriped earlier this year. They apparently was allowed to cloak Google so to Google they must clearly be doing WH stuff :) If most other sites did the same it would be deemed BH. Do you think Google like what NPR do? If not, why did they not remove it?

This just emphasize where the real focus on the engines is: The results. Not so much weather we label it WH or BH. In the NPR case it probably made sense to allow them to cloak - for others it might not. Thats entirely up to the engines do decide.

This just emphasize where the real focus on the engines is: The results. Not so much weather we label it WH or BH.
ultimately the SE's are aiming to get what a subjective person would consider the most appropriate site(s) to the top of the rankings. I guess therefore that if you do happen to have the most appropriate site for a particular query the SE will be glad of the SEO on the site (which would otherwise be buried under everything else) and if you don't they're not going to approve whatever type of optimising you might be doing.

If the eval. reports/rumours are all true then sites are being whitelisted. That would tend to imply that blind eyes are going to be turned irrespective of the type of SEO (not that that's exactly news but perhaps the band of 'whitelisted' is broadening from blue chip names down to other 'essential' sites).

It sounds like you still need to get on page one to be assessed and deemed essential though so that would sort of encourage some pretty aggressive SEO if you believe you've got the site that needs to be there for a specific query.

I really don't believe that any across-the-board algo, however complicated, is going to manage to penalise spam and not penalise genuine website marketing for much longer. Every single thing that you can legitimately do to promote your website can be or already is mimicked by some form of 'spam' SEO. Until Google developes a mindreading algo every spammy site they kill will also hit a decent genuine site - they're stuffed - what can they do?.

SE's can only be truly saved by making the personalised search/self tweaked results option work properly which of course also happens to make advertising nice and targeted.

By golly, some noted guru with a wildly popular newsletter told a former client of mine (who I fired - LOL) - that her pages weren't ranking because they didn't have an <H1)

For the record, it wasn't me!

In fact, most of the time it dosen't seem to me that engines really care that much about BH versus WH - they just care about results and user experience.

I agree with this. That is very, very clear from the seach results as well as through what search engine reps discuss at conferences.

I'm gonna have to disagree with you again, Mikkel. I don't know the cloaking case you referred to so I can't discuss it, but I can say that cloaking isn't seo, and neither is hidden text, auto-redirecting, etc. etc. etc. They are techniques that some SEOs use, but they are not intrinsically seo techniques. They are also techniques that the engines are perfectly happy with as long as they are not used to manipulate the rankings.

It's my long-held belief that the engines would very much prefer to have a 'clean' web - a web that isn't tainted by pages that try to manipulate the rankings. Writing decent copy, writing proper Titles, and ensuring good navigation isn't trying to manipulate the rankings - it's merely trying to let the engines know that the pages are there, and what they are about, and the engines welcome those measures because it helps them. Seo comes after that, and is concerned solely with ranking manipulation. Ask any search engine person who counts if their company is perfectly happy that people manipulate their rankings by putting pages into the top 10 just because they think they belong there, and I have no doubt at all that the answer will be "no". It's my belief that the engines think they can do ok on their own, and they really don't like people like us interfering with what they are doing.

There are certain times that a complete WH site can get away with cloaking, in fact Google even know of one that does it perfectly and they don't mind at all..


DaveN

Lots of WH sites cloak with Google's blessing - stack of forums, for instance, not to mention Google themselves.

I would guess that whether or not serious cloaking gets penalised if spotted depends a lot on the site. If it's a big name company, then I'd guess that it would overlooked as long the cloaked pages are relevant to the ones they cloak, but I'd guess that an unknown site would get the chop for the same thing. I'd probably be inclined towards the same decisions because I'd believe that the big name company simply wouldn't cloak in ways that are bad for surfers, but I would think that, if the unkown does it ethically, then they may decide to do it unethically in the future - I wouldn't trust them in the same way that I'd trust a big name company.

If you think about it, the engines can't be too bothered about cloaking itself because it's the easiest thing for them to programmatically spot if they want to. I'm sure they are more bothered about whether or not the cloaked pages accurately reflect the pages they cloak, and that isn't anything like as easy to programmatically decide.

SEOptimization = manipulation

I think SE owners must have a pretty mixed view of SEO.

You forgot the best definition to add regarding the relationship between SEO's and SE's:

"symbiotic"

A phenomenon where two different organisms live together in a mutually beneficial relationship. Both organisms in provide each other with food, protection, or some other survival need. The most famous example is the anemone and clownfish. The anemone provides protection to the clownfish within its stinging tentacles, and the clownfish provides the anemone with scraps of food.
www.seasky.org/aquarium/sea3a.html

BH or WH...relevancy is the only important thing.

I think that describes the relationship between websites and search engines, Chris, and not SEOs/search engines ;)

I think that describes the relationship between websites and search engines, Chris, and not SEOs/search engines ;)

Think again, Phil. Would SEO's exist w/out search engines? Would SE's have as many relevant results for popular terms without SE's?

Websites can exist perfectly well w/out search engines.

I can see what you're getting at, but I still have to disagree. SEs don't need SEOs. In fact, I'm sure they would say that they prefer not to have them, and that they generally interfere with and spoil the results. But they do need website owners, and website owners need them. They are on opposite sides and the engines make no attempt to help website owners, but they do need them.

Google came along with a new way of ranking pages, and everyone said how much better the relevancy of their results was than the other engines, so everyone started to use Google. That was before SEOs started to seo Google's new way. Then SEOs started on them and they've had to make algo changes just to deal with some of it. As a result, the relevancy of their results has deteriorated a lot, so that, if they were a startup engine today, they wouldn't succeed, imo.

Yes, I know that they've made algo changes for other reasons as well, but SEOs are one of the reasons they make changes.

Phil, I understand your argument, and respect it. But I argue that SE's do need SEO's because for the most part, we are getting sites ranked for search-relevant sites.

As far as website owners needing SE's, that is really just a matter of choice. If someone spends enough money on other forms of media, they may take the stance that they could care less about the SE's. If you blast 3 commercials during the superbowl of a site with an easy to rememeber URL, chances are people will visit your site. I know a fair amount of site owners that have chosen to not go with marketing to SE's, simply because they feel the URL on their business card or other marketing is enough to get who they want to the site.

Unfortunately I feel we are getting off topic here, though. This is supposed to be about WH and BH, which is a much more nasty argument :p

Of course website owners need search engines, they are the lifeblood of every commercial website, and of course the search engines would have nothing to search if it were not for the websites.

Yes there are other ways to market a site, but none so inexpensive, far reaching and which allow you to interact with the customer at exactly the time he is interested in your product.

I daresay if search engines did not exist that there would be less than 10% of the sites that we have online today.

I suspect that the webmasters need SEOs far more than the search engines do.

I suspect that the webmasters need SEOs far more than the search engines do.
no doubt. there are millions of sites and only a few engines. each additional site potentially adds value for the engine and potentially takes customers from other sites.

I think that in the long term, content remains king. I've watched us go through all the various trends. Multiple title tags. H1 tags. Doorway pages. Cloaked doorways. Free For All pages. Blog links. Directory links. You can focus on particular techniques, but if you don't have the underlying foundation of a great web site, I don't think you do well over the long-haul.

Content is also about to get much more important. Last week was an incredibly big change that I don't think has really sunk in yet for many people. Both Google and Yahoo get personalized results into their regular results in some way. If you haven't tried Google's system yet, you'd better. It's easy to start with and shows you in short order how everyone is going to have a completely different view of the web.

You can still do things to improve your rankings across the range of SEO techniques out there, from the commonly accepted white hat stuff to extremely agressive black hat stuff. But long term, it's going to be your "trust rating" or your "trust rank" that's going to kick in.

I don't mean TrustRank in the paper some are familiar with. I mean your trust analysis in using non-link, non-page content ways to figure out which pages seem trustworthy. It's how I concluded my Yahoo My Web: An eBay For Knowledge (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050630-101327) article from last week, how trust will be calculated. And at the core of that trust is having a page that delivers something really relevant back to the particular use. No matter how you got them there, did you offer up something quality?

That also nicely sidesteps the general issues with "over-optimization" penalities or stuff that supposedly is black hat until it's helpful in even a search engine's view to improve relevancy. It won't matter if you're doing cloaking in the future, for example, if the search engine finds that people think you have trustworthy content.

By the way, while Google's guidelines, http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html, still say "Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects," it's noteworthy that the specific FAQ that explained what cloaking was on this page, http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html#cloaking. They used to say this:

The term "cloaking" is used to describe a website that returns altered webpages to search engines crawling the site. In other words, the webserver is programmed to return different content to Google than it returns to regular users, usually in an attempt to distort search engine rankings. This can mislead users about what they'll find when they click on a search result. To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors that engage in cloaking.

Since June, they've dropped it entirely. I'd been lobbying for the definition to change to perhaps something like shown here: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/041201-063855. Meanwhile, we've got Google about to expand the authorized cloaking it allows through programs like First Click Free, http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?threadid=6607.

So the white hat/black hat thing? If it was a point of debate before, it gets even more so as the search engines themselves become more tolerant. That is, only if you get stuck on techniques. If you get focused on overall goal, sending people to relevant, trustworthy sites, then the actual technique used to elevant those sites becomes less of an issue of the search engine also feels they have a way to reward relevancy and trustworthyness. The systems Yahoo and Google rolled out last week are designed to do that -- which brings things back to the basic question -- is your site going to be deemed trustworthy and relevant by those who arrive. If so, you should be doing well in the long term.

personalized results : no my laptop they are perfect..

on my home system ... what the hell, I wanted a builder, not "BOB the Builder" ( yes I have children ) .. to many different users and seeming how i'm the one who gets the least Home usage ... Kids, Wife, Cat and then Me personalized turned off... the world looks normal again

DaveN

Danny, allthough I absolutely agree with you - long-term, very often those long-term aspects are worth more to the brand managers and the researchers than it is the the "real" marketers that have (often short-term) goals they are forced to reach. Most marketers just can't afford to wait for the world to become a fair place and the engines to rank sites according to their real "trust" and value. The fact is, as of today, that very often it is NOT the most trusted sites that actually gain the top ranks (DaveN will have, I believe, a very interesting example of this coming up in his blog :)).

Content may be king - but what kind of content?

Tim O'Reilly was quoted the other day for saying (in Weird): "... the future of the internet will be created from interlocking connections of open data services that will be constantly improved and tweake"

Is he talking about scraper sites? :D


I also think you make one other mistake Danny, there are many ways to build a lomg-term strategy that works, not just one.

One strategy is to build a "mountin" that will last forever (the "content is king" and "Trust" strategy), one other way is to build many little mountins that will each have a limited life time but that will grow faster in numbers than they die out. I know a lot of good business men that works this way - also in many areas that have nothing to do with Internet. Actually, some of the most profitable people I know do just that: They start a company (or buy a small one) grow it a little and sell it - move on to the next. There is no long-term strategies in each project except for taking it to the next corner and cash in - and then do it again. Off course, most often you'll have a lot of small business going on in such a scheme at the same time. It works just fine.

Also, there are many types of business where you don't have to think long term. If I can gain a top position for some of the most profitable keywords on the web I'll do it - even if it only last for 3 month. Do you realize what a top 3 position on some of those keywords can bring in on a monthly basis? I would personally be more that happy with just 3 month at the top for those - and then move on to the next :)

Not all strategies works for all companies, verticals or projects. If I am in the "used car" market I am not going to wait for my little site to gain more "trust" and "content" than Edmunds and MSN Cars - it just won't happen! And even worse, if I am in the "Viagra" market I am certainly not going to wait for any trust to come around. I will go to "war" and win it - that simple.

For the past 8 years of being involved in search I've heard it so many times from various sources: Just around the corner, the engines will be able to fight all (or most) so called "spam" (editorial crap). Has it happend yet? Just look for yourself ... Recent changes, and new ones to come, will probably give engines better control over what they want to show - and with personalization users may also get a more direct influence on it. Thats all great. But it won't stop creative programmers and SEOs from finding loopholes and tweaks that will give them advantages in organic results.

Spamming personalization algos has already become the new game in town ... and the engines are definately not having the best odds at this point :rolleyes:

I also think you make one other mistake Danny, there are many ways to build a lomg-term strategy that works, not just one.
No, Mikkel, there's only one strategy that works. I saw it posted on the Google web site, so it must be true.

Just joking! Yes, I should reiterate that all the above is my own view and with all things SEO, everyone's particular instances may vary.

In particular, the point of view of whether you are a business wanting to think long term (or can) is an issue. If you're a large brand site, or you are offering a product in the long term over time, then I think developing up good content makes sense. And as for what is content, to me it's stuff that goes beyond making a sale directly. It's making your shoe selling site also into a great resource about buying shoes, walking tips, running advice and so on. So yeah, it is building that mountain.

But other people may not be in a position to build or may simply not want to go that route. And I have no doubt there's always going to be an opportunity to manipulate any search algorithm and pick up lots of traffic from default results. Personalization changes the game, but it doesn't eliminate it.

I just think it's always too easy for any search marketer to get lost in specific techniques. So I just add an H1, and then I rank well, right? Oh, it's just getting links, right?

Various things help, as we all know, and to differing degrees. But many people would better start out at the very fundamental level. Are you offering a decent web site from the beginning. Are you really the best in your class. The most you can start from there, the more I think you can successfully make use of other techniques and also ride thorugh how the algos change over time.

I think we will see poachers become gamekeepers.. in the future... and the se with most poachers will win out ..

DaveN

and how many sites will have search my site using google or yahoo on their site from today ;)

DaveN

Well, this discussion went off in about 5 different directions but in the end has turned into a very interesting read. Some good stuff in here to think about. Just wanted to say thanks to all who contributed.

Well, this discussion went off in about 5 different directions but in the end has turned into a very interesting read. Some good stuff in here to think about. Just wanted to say thanks to all who contributed.

I'll agree with you there pleeker.

This topic of WH/BH has is an interesting one because it's a subject that has long plagued the industry I'm in currently. The top results that show up for the keywords most relevant for our industry bring up some slightly related sites that just point to other sites with more relevancy while the actual relevant sites show up way in the back.

So now we have to ask ourselves, should we abandon the long term SEO techniques and try the short term solution to get listed up front? Or do we stick with a technique that may prove more valuable in the long run, but take some time to get implemented? I'm not sure anymore to be honest. It seems that no matter which route I take, some sort of WH/BH trick is going to take us off of the top and I'll end up having this discussion over and over.

So now, what about grey hat hacking? A little from column A, a little from column B.

JEC

I think the decision as to what to do in the case of any specific website is quite easy actually - 95% of the WH/BH arguments seem to me to be because people are wanting different things from their SEO and often can't understand there's another pov. The other 5% is an argument not even worth having.

Basically if you're looking for a quick profit but have no brand concerns then either a) you can get instant results with WH anyway because the competition for your keyword is weak or b) you need BH

If you're building a brand and the most important thing is your site will always be listed then either a) use whitehat and live with page 2 or b) start saving to hire an incredibly good BH 'cos if you try it yourself you'll almost certainly crash and burn.

The only exceptions to this are;

If you're a blue-chip with good contacts at Google then don't worry you'll be safe whatever you do.

if you get moral twinges when reading the webmaster guidelines then stop fooling yourself - you'll never do BH. :)

if you get moral twinges when reading the webmaster guidelines then stop fooling yourself - you'll never do BH. :)

Thanks Gurtie. I get twinges when I think that some of our competitors are taking the BH route and sticking it to us while we abide by the SE rules and suffer the penalties of not being found. I for one prefer to use genuine WH tactics because we are in this for the long haul, not the short run. But in such a competitive world, to stay ahead you have to do something different to make yourself stand out. I haven't figured out what that something is yet, but I'm checking into it. ;)

JEC

If you define white hat as sticking to the "search engine rules" as published then you can forget about ranking for anything the least bit competitive and remain "white hat".

If you instead define white hat as following the search engines current practices, then you have another problem because besides changing from day to day, we can only guess at what is allowed and what is not at any given point in time.

IMO SEO is not a science its an art, and there are no black hats or white hats, there are only those who are good and those who are better.

Just because someone is able to rank better using techniques which you think may be unwilling to use they are not necessarily wrong, they just have a different strategy.

This is my favorite definition of white hat from Google's webmaster page:

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, ’Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?

I think it's very simple and includes it all. No need for nitpicking over H1 tags. They serve many other purposes than seo. Use common sense and apply what you feel as being appropriate from a designer's point of view :cool:

by the 'would I do this if search engines didn't exist' definition of WH I can say that it doesn't work for any but the least competitive of keywords.

There's a huge huge difference between getting indexed and ranking. Ignoring the search engines doesn't stop you getting indexed, but it doesn't get you ranked.

I think it rather implies to do things that make sense in more ways than achieve rankings. "Does this help my users?" comes right before what you've quoted.

IMO Google is sick of seo's using tactics that don't improve a site's quality and usablility while it's being optimized :)

Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?That alone would put *all* SEOs out of work.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankingsAnd that's another bit the would put all SEOs out of work on it's own.

IMO Google is sick of seo's using tactics that don't improve a site's quality and usablility while it's being optimizedIt's got nothing to do with Google, or any engine, whether or not anyone improves a site's quality and usability. It's not their concern so they can hardly be sick about it.

It's got nothing to do with Google, or any engine, whether or not anyone improves a site's quality and usability. It's not their concern so they can hardly be sick about it.
That I strongly disagree with. They have a job to do just like we do. Theirs is to make sure that the most relevant search results produce sites that the visitors are pleased with. If all you focus on is what works right now in order to be ranked instead of looking at a long term solutions (improve a site with the search engines in mind), I can see how they don't consider your site worthy of being up there.

"does this help my users"

yeeeees. Sort of. Nice sentiment but only to a point.

I'm a huge fan of usability and well designed websites - it's what we do - some of the stuff we put online is really horribly complex and making it usable for online customers is majorly important.

But honestly I can say that there comes a point when you can have the most usable, best designed, spiderably friendly site and it cannot compete.

Honestly with one client, whos site has won awards, every single page is indexed and for resorts where there's little competition they rank high on the first page. Where there's competition from the big boys they're page 5, page 6, whatever. That's not because of poor design or navigation - that's because other people have more aggresively optimised for those terms.

Now, that site can't use any blackhat and pretty much it's stuck there.

The ones which do rank are either household names or black-hatted ones (probably owned by someone here - thanks guys :rolleyes: ).

So while I'm sure WH is ultimately the best brand building exercise I don't believe it can always work as well as BH. And if you don't need brand building then you have to consider BH. People who choose not to use it have that right but imho need to stop pretending that WH is going to get you to #1 every time.

Meanwhile I'm not that bothered because 80% of that sites visits come from places other than SE's and it's earning money. I guess we could probably double traffic if we could hit P1 for the competative ones too but the money/risk it would take to do it are enormous for this client.

That I strongly disagree with. They have a job to do just like we do. Theirs is to make sure that the most relevant search results produce sites that the visitors are pleased with. If all you focus on is what works right now in order to be ranked instead of looking at a long term solutions (improve a site with the search engines in mind), I can see how they don't consider your site worthy of being up there.

Yes but they shouldn't be concerned what you do with your site. They should be concerned with what they do with their site.

if they feel a site isn't worthy of listing or ranking highly then thats up to them. If a siteowner wants to put something the SE's don't like on their site that's up to the siteowner.

That I strongly disagree with. They have a job to do just like we do. Theirs is to make sure that the most relevant search results produce sites that the visitors are pleased with. If all you focus on is what works right now in order to be ranked instead of looking at a long term solutions (improve a site with the search engines in mind), I can see how they don't consider your site worthy of being up there.The engines' job is to satisfy their users - I think we can agree so far. Sure they would probably like to only list nice quality websites with wonderful usability, but it's not their job to do that. Their job is to present the most relevant results for a specific query, and that's all. If they do that, nobody can complain when a ranked website is a bit more difficult to find your way around than another, for instance. In other words, their job is to produce relevant results, and not to produce pages at the top of the rankings because they are from quality sites with great usability. Search engines do not judge quality - only relevancy.

If all you focus on is what works right now in order to be ranked instead of looking at a long term solutions (improve a site with the search engines in mind), I can see how they don't consider your site worthy of being up there.The Google condition of that site of mine has nothing to do with quality or usability issues, so let's not get personal, eh?

The Google condition of that site of mine has nothing to do with quality or usability issues, so let's not get personal, eh?
Was speaking generally :)

Ah sorry. I thought you were referring to a site of mine that Bourbon hit. I've mentioned a few times in this forum - hence my misunderstanding.

Yes but they shouldn't be concerned what you do with your site. They should be concerned with what they do with their site.

if they feel a site isn't worthy of listing or ranking highly then thats up to them. If a siteowner wants to put something the SE's don't like on their site that's up to the siteowner.
Absolutely! But I believe what their statement is asking seo's to do is meet them half way. We as seo's benefit from their traffic. They are concerned about beating the other engines with best, most user-friendly results.

Ah sorry. I thought you were referring to a site of mine that Bourbon hit. I've mentioned a few times in this forum - hence my misunderstanding.
No problem. If I had a problem with your site, I'd PM you ;) hehe

I didn't read all of this thread but I wanted to put my two cents in.

It is not about white hat or black hat optimization. It is about relevancy which is brought on by proper site development. Build your site to be as resourceful as you can. Provide free information and link out to related information. Build a site for the users and the engines will come.

PS representing your content to the engines better by using relevant titles and H1s help the visitors too.

It's about achieving great rankings while keeping the balance :cool:

But how do you determine what's the equilibrium? Ain't in reality we are all in the mercy of the SE's?

Of course we are :) And IMO the smartest thing is to rather look at what the search engines are trying to do rather than over-obsess with whatever seo tactic is working right now.
There are certain tactics that have been working for years (or rather a combination of them all) and those are what I stick with.

They tend to ALL be things that make sense in other aspects than seo as well.
"Act as if the search engines don't exist" is to me more of a reminder not to follow anybody blindly, but apply common sense as well. seo knowledge is very important, but I have seen people destroy their own sites by over-obsessing with it and their conversion rates sunk.

So while working on rankings, why not use methods that include natural link traffic, implementing navigation better for search engines and users and adding good related info giving your visitors a professional appeal and the search engines something nice to crawl.

Mike

So while working on rankings, why not use methods that include natural link traffic, implementing navigation better for search engines and users and adding good related info giving your visitors a professional appeal and the search engines something nice to crawl.

I don't think anyone here argues against that, for any site which wants longevity.

Afaik there are two types of BH - there's the crash and burn type, where the site doesn't matter. Short term profits, who cares about the risk, owned by the BH 99% of the time. As far as that goes arguments about building a better site are superflous. The only argument against those sites is the *bleuch* 'stakeholders' one. To me that's not an SEO argument specifically but a business one, in all business areas there are people out to earn quick money, some more damaging than others. Just like offline consumer standards (SE Algos) are closing down offending businesses all the time.

I do see the argument that these sites can damage the profits of other more traditionally marketed sites and the 'user experience' but you could also make a case (I'm not sure I do but in the spirit of devils advocacy I probably would over a beer if my WH drinking buddy didn't start foaming at the mouth too soon) that this competition is actually driving WH sites to be better than they would otherwise, so while the BH's are at the top with their nasty poorly designed and screen scraped sites which visitors will be horrified by anyway, those of us with lovely customer friendly sites are working our bits off to improve the user experiencem in every way we can and capture the clients that skip the first 2 pages of results. BH is good for us. It concentrates the mind.

The other type of BH is the type that works for clients and I think is the type people in this thread are arguing against? Damaging the customers long term prospects for short term gain? Well I believe, although I can't speak for them, that most BH in this market advise clients that BH is the last resort - that is, the BH SEO will do all the things that WH SEO's do first, and only then consider cloaking, voodoo dolls etc. In other words BH SEO's with clients work in addition to WH methods and not instead of and build a better site before doing whatever they also do.

I know someones going to say there's a third type of BH, who adds white on white text, stuffs alt tags etc. Well to be honest that's not BH that's an incompetent SEO. They come in a variety of colours but they're a much much bigger danger to the industry than most of the BH's I've got to know :)

>>so you are saying no matter how the code of a page is marked up it will have no effect on how the page ranks?

>>For the most part, that is correct.
>>I wouldn't say it absolutely as nothing is quite that black and white, but yeah, for the most part, the code on the page won't have much (if any) effect on search engine rankings. Just in case this slips by, it's an important point that needs to be reiterated.

For one, Google uses characteristics in the HTML markup (aka the code), according to the original papers - unless somewhere along the line they stopped, and there's been no documentation of them having done so.

According to the description of Google's architecture, there is a Repository that stores the full HTML of every page, and there are identifiable HTML elements included in the "hit list' for pages, including aesthetic and visual elements such as capitalization, font and bolding - called "plain" hits in the original Backrub paper as opposed to other elements called "Fancy hits".

Afaik there are two types of BHI understand it the same way, Gurtie. It's also my suspicion that some of the pages out there that are cloaked may not even be "hiding" anything more than hiding from other webmasters what they've done to help the pages rank, which may or may not include HTML elements that wouldn't be aesthetically pleasing on the pages delivered to visitors, though the actual content may be the same.

We can't know, not having *seen* the cloaked pages, but if we examine the swipe rate that's growing every day, that seems like a justification for cloaking on purely moral grounds in some cases, for the purpose of protecting pages from the immorality of the thievery that's going on. The lines betwen BH/WH can easily start to blur, if we look at it that way.

Hiding the source code from competitors used to be *the* reason for cloaking. It also meant that the display didn't need to be aesthetically pleasing, but protection from theft was the main reason for it. That was when the engines relied solely on a page's content for rankings. But since link text became such a dominant factor, I've sometimes wondered what benefit remains in cloaking. I can understand the desire to use link texts and some body text that wouldn't look 'nice' on the screen, but that's all. Maybe I just haven't thought it about it enough.

If content is set to make a comeback due to semantics, then cloaking will come into its own again, and people will again want to hide their pages from competitors. But, even then, the engines aren't going to rely on each individual page's content again in the way that they used to.

It's great to see logic and professionalism finally taking hold of this industry after years of preaching. I know there are those in this industry that feel I may have crossed lines with some of my creative marketing ideas, (anyone remember the "Help Stop Spam condoms? The drunken orgy in Las Vegas and Orlando?), but it was never personal it was always about business and it certainly was not due to a lack of respect for anyone. Especially some of the greatest leaders on the web today. Even so, I don't think anyone could deny I'm pretty much a put-my-money-where-my-big-mouth-is kind of guy. And, going back to moderating for years at Jimworld, I have stayed on message and done what I felt I could to promote the industry.

The days of blackhat witch hunting are finally coming to an end. Trying to convince yourself you are good by trying to convince others they are bad will soon take a back seat to simply doing business.

The time is drawing near for a search engine marketing association that could have a real impact. From the beginning, the very first thing that needed to happen was to accept that it is about sales and marketing and not about making a name for yourself by trying to "out" your peers. As we accept our true strengths and limitations as an industry, we can now learn from past mistakes and unite. Once united, the industry can NOT be ignored by the engines, by the agencies, by the consumers and by the advertisers.

It feels good to think you may have played a small part in that.

... Trying to convince yourself you are good by trying to convince others they are bad will soon take a back seat to simply doing business...

Thats got to be the SEO Quote Of The Year Bob. :)

I really appreciate that quote. I wish could make my points that well.

I have oftened wondered what bh/wh had to do with business. IMHO that concept works against business. And from a practical perspective a search engine cannot understand ethics. It operates on rules, and all the quirks inherent within the technology.

The suggestion by some, that you can just create and optimize a website for human visitors, and the search engines will give you a high ranking, just doesn't make sense to me. Search engine machines and human creatures are 2 distinctly different visitors. Example: I might design my website sales copy to upsell a customer from a cheaper to a more expensive item or service, and it might work very well. The site is optimized for sales, but that has nothing to do with optimization for the search engines. If I am wrong here, will someone please correct me. I just don't see the connection.

There are some who boast that they have high rankings in the SERPS, and they got there from white hat search engine optimization. They preach to others as if they are doing something unethical, if they don't have high rankings. They further state that they have a very popular site. I guess it never occurs to them that a popular site will incur many relevant links that will in turn give them a high ranking.

I think you'll find that those who 'preach' WH, do so because they want to help the engines to keep their indexes free from clutter, repetitions, and things like that. It's not a bad idea, and I'm sure they believe that they really are helping the engines, but, as you said, it has nothing to do with business, except that they have also 'preached' that WH rankings stand the test of time, are not subject to every wind of algo change, and that Google will get you if you use BH methods. If it were true, they would have a good business point.

But it's never been true, and one of the most outspoken of them is tired of waiting, and now concedes that the idea that "Google's gonna getcha" for using BH methods just isn't happening as was expected. They also know from experience that Google gets WH and BH stuff with the winds of algo changes, and that Google doesn't care one way or the other if they throw out some WH sites as they seek to improve their algorithm.

So perhaps Bob's prediction is already starting to happen, and some of the 'preachers' are realising some realities.

exactly.

every single day i sit here and read about how someones website got deindexed or dropped in rankings and that only WH methods were used and oh the search engines are playing with fire for daring to exert some control over their own invention and oh wait for the day that they realize who they're delaing with and oh i sell the best widgets and should be number one in google.

I think you'll find that those who 'preach' WH, do so because they want to help the engines to keep their indexes free from clutter, repetitions, and things like that. It's not a bad idea, and I'm sure they believe that they really are helping the engines, but, as you said, it has nothing to do with business, except that they have also 'preached' that WH rankings stand the test of time, are not subject to every wind of algo change, and that Google will get you if you use BH methods. If it were true, they would have a good business point.
.
I wouldn't call it that. It's more about anticipating certain changes before they come. Looking at a direction the search engines are headed in. There are so many sites that rise and fall. but there are also those that have been doing well for the past 5 years without ever missing a beat. Doing WH may not always get you the same results as fast, but it can pay off long term. I am not here to preach anything, just sharing what's been working well for me in the past 5-6 years :)

That's fair enough, and if your methods have done well for you, good luck. But there are clean sites that have also hardly missed a beat since Google began, and yet they suddenly suffer for some unknown reason. I'm not suggesting that it happens to most sites, of course, but it does happen to sites - black or white.

I wouldn't call it that. It's more about anticipating certain changes before they come. Looking at a direction the search engines are headed in. There are so many sites that rise and fall. but there are also those that have been doing well for the past 5 years without ever missing a beat. Doing WH may not always get you the same results as fast, but it can pay off long term. I am not here to preach anything, just sharing what's been working well for me in the past 5-6 years

But, would your opionion change on any of this if all your sites dropped dramatically tommorrow? And, would you blame it on b/h techniques? Or, would you blame it on G, like so many people have done. Or, would you search desparately for way to get back to the top within the guidelines of G's everchanging rulebook? Something to think about. You're not the first person to make that type of statement about longevity. I hope you continue to do well.

I don't like many of the techniques black hats use, because they are a nuisance to my searches. They are a nuisance, not unethical! SE'S can't decide morality. There are black hat techniques that I think are just fine, like doorway pages. A SE can't determine that someone has used a doorway page for a perfectly good reason, such as, a specific index of some pages, that looks just like a doorway page. The same thing applies with duplicate content.

But, SE's don't have to list a site either. If I use a technique that gets my site to the top of the pile, and it isn't against the law of the land, I win, and the SE loses. If the SE see's my top listing and spots something it doesn't like, and my site is banned or submerged, I lose, and the SE wins. Oh well! That's competion! That's business, and I think it's fun.

I may be wrong, but I really don't see any way that we can predict changes before the search engines implement them, especially since many of these "predictions" are based on things like googles catch all patent etc.

I can show you sites that are five or six years old, have always done well in the search engines, have only used search engine approved optimization techniques (one of them even to the point of never having purchased, solicited or traded a single link) that dropped from above the fold rankings to rankings in the mid 50s. In cases like this last one trying to blame the decrease in rankings on linking penalties does not make much sense at all.

But, would your opionion change on any of this if all your sites dropped dramatically tommorrow? And, would you blame it on b/h techniques? Or, would you blame it on G, like so many people have done. Or, would you search desparately for way to get back to the top within the guidelines of G's everchanging rulebook? Something to think about. You're not the first person to make that type of statement about longevity. I hope you continue to do well.
Yes, I probably would. but personally (until lately) the search engine algo changes have made sense to me. No matter how dissatisfied many seos have been, I have seen overall improvements in the search results. I think that every site needs to be built around a strong theme first. Something that can stand on it's own and start out with some rankings quickly do to the right content with a few links. As you expand the areas you target (such as going from "Pacific beach real estate" to "San Diego Real Estate"), you will get those terms the more links you have from San Diego sites (general sites) and nationwide real estate sites. Everything you do to increase creditility to the eyes of the visitor and do it with seo in mind, seems to work the best.

I have seen too many sites with dilluted content and scattered IBLs and those seem to be hit the hardest. The best links my clients have ever gotten were the ones given voluntarily from site owners who seemed to like their content and considered it useful.

IMO OBL's to good sources help you as well. I don't think it is too hard to seo when you model yourself after top ranked sites, analyze why they are high up in the SERPs (or at least try to) and model yourself after that.

Any site can be up there if the webmaster is willing to spend enough time, money, energy and has the right state of mind focussing on pride in his business rather than quick fixing.

Consulting seems to work best for me, because some clients will surprise you with their self motivation and dedication to generate good content and getting links from site owners that they know. Some of the work they do, I cannot do because they know their community and their profession better than me.

All I am saying is that when you REALLY focus on a site as if it was your one and only business site, you should not take any chances. I cannot predict what the search engines will do next, but I can have an opinion such as what I would do in their shoes if I wanted to provide better search results, and then hope that I'm right.

Mike

Originally Posted by SiteTutor
All I am saying is that when you REALLY focus on a site as if it was your one and only business site, you should not take any chances. I cannot predict what the search engines will do next, but I can have an opinion such as what I would do in their shoes if I wanted to provide better search results, and then hope that I'm right.


Well stated! I just hope you don't get discouraged if the other cowboys shoot you out of the saddle one of these days.


I have been fortunate enough to enjoy success with SEO for my clients, and myself. I don't really have much concern over losing high rankings. My listings move around alot. The only problems I have are with sites that are highly competive. I have probably done what others have classified as black hat in the past (i'm sure I have), but it really doesn't bother me, because I enjoy SEO.

Well stated! Thanks!
I just hope you don't get discouraged if the other cowboys shoot you out of the saddle one of these days.


.
Boy, I hope so. Lately I've been kind of scared. Some of the things I've seen don't make too much sense.

The best links my clients have ever gotten were the ones given voluntarily from site owners who seemed to like their content and considered it useful.
To me that underlines the worst thing about SEO in the last couple of years - it's rare to find anyone who's prepared to link to a site just because it's good now - it always has to become a request for a link exchange or a matter of negotiation.

That's right, Gurtie, but it isn't the fault of SEOs or of website owners. Google created it. The introduction of PageRank suddenly meant that linking out of a site cost the site something that would negatively affect its rankings. OBLs suddenly became detrimental to rankings, and websites needed to prevent the effect by requiring matching IBLs. It's Google that did it, not website owners or SEOs. I don't know if Google object to link exchanges or not, but they caused it, so they don't have any grounds for complaint.

Actually, link popularity had come in before Google arrived, and I suppose link exchages started with that, but the introduction of PageRank caused one-way OBLs to be detrimental to a site's rankings, so that was the real start. All that websites and SEOs have been doing since then is fitting in with Google by arranging links that don't hurt the rankings.

In other words, it's their fault - not ours :)


added .................................................. ................................

If a new engine comes along, becomes very popular, and states that:-

(1) they take no notice whatsoever of a site's content.

(2) they use the quantity of links to a page, and their link texts, to rank pages.

(3) the more a site links out, the lower down the rankings its pages will be.

(4) the more IBLs a site has, the higher up the rankings its pages will be.

what are people going to do? Apart from taking no notice whatsoever of a site's content, that's exactly what Google did. Links and link text have always been of such importance for Google rankings that the whole 'I won't link to you unless you link to me' thing is entirely their doing. They actually spoiled the normal functioning of the web, didn't they ;)

I have been thoroughly enjoying this thread since its begining. I must say that some people in the past have taken this subject a little too personally. This conversation has proven that the "war" seems to be settling down (at least in this Forum-I won't mention others that seem to slam SEW for being "riddled with BH artists").

PhilC makes a valid point when he describes the waning "G's gonna getcha" feeling many WH "preachers" are experiencing. I stated that WH "works just fine for me," and I still feel that the warning of possible banning it is relevant advice to give people considering BH. The world of Grey Hatters is certainly greatly increasing in size, however. In my political views I have always despised extremists on either side of the fence, since I am such a fence-sitter and I feel that extremists cause too many problems. Perhaps business can stir equal feelings.

Many people say "it's just business." In my opinion, prevailing business practices describe societies as clearly as their dominant political persona.

The description of WH as being in a "cesspool" in the title of thread is probably what stirred up the hardest feelings initially. Perhaps nomas was looking to start a war, but, once again, I commend those who have participated in here keeping things on a civil level.

I will be wearing grey at SES :p

To me that underlines the worst thing about SEO in the last couple of years - it's rare to find anyone who's prepared to link to a site just because it's good now - it always has to become a request for a link exchange or a matter of negotiation.
Yes, and IMO that has hurt the overall quality of search results a lot. People don't link to good sites, they link to sites willing to link back.

I must say that some people in the past have taken this subject a little too personally. This conversation has proven that the "war" seems to be settling down (at least in this Forum-I won't mention others that seem to slam SEW for being "riddled with BH artists").It's the nature of individual forums, Chris, or rather, it's down to each forum's management. A few of them seem to thrive on conflict. But when a forum won't allow mud-slinging from either side, sensible discussions are possible, which can be helpful to all sides.

It's forum managements that dictate the quality of forums, and this one seems to be particularly good. It doesn't disallow the various opinions, and it doesn't allow mud-slinging. All colours of hats can feel at home here. If the forum's mods were all of one persuasion, then it may not be so good.

Many people say "it's just business."I'm one of those people. To my way of thinking, it *is* just business. I don't care if other sites genuinely deserve to rank higher than the site I am promoting, business is business, and I do my best to get the site to the top, as long as it's for relevent search queries. If I can't get it there by WH means (and I usually can), then I am happy to use BH methods because - business is business.

Originally Posted by PhilC
I'm one of those people. To my way of thinking, it *is* just business. I don't care if other sites genuinely deserve to rank higher than the site I am promoting, business is business, and I do my best to get the site to the top, as long as it's for relevent search queries. If I can't get it there by WH means (and I usually can), then I am happy to use BH methods because - business is business.

I would agree with you except for the part about deserving to rank higher than you. IMO no one deserves a high ranking. To me that's personal. SEO is business.

I used to sell cars. Regardless of what you think of car salesman, many of them are ethical people. But, I learned something at the very beginning: If you don't sell a car to the person who drives into your lot, someone down the street will. The fearful are defeated. I roadblocked 1 visitor from leaving the lot. He got mad, but I sold him a car, and he was very satisfied with his purchase when he left.

In the end I think people who think in terms of bh/wh will be left behind. IMO we need to be educated as to the tricks of the SE's. Find their weakness and vulnerabilities. Competition is fierce. If you ignore this reality, some day big "G" will stir the waters again, and your big ship will sink, like so many others have done.

I guess I am saying, "Be Prepared". Have a plan B. I have registered extra domains for the purpose of SE research, and I have learned many new things.
IMO it's about survival, not ethics or white hat/black hat.

> IMO no one deserves a high ranking.

Oh yes, I do! :D
I know what you mean but sometimes you just have to believe in the unbelievable to reach your goals. I may not be right but I honestly, deep in my heart, feel that I DO deserve the best rankings. Evrytime!

However, on a strategic level I realize it's not possible for me to rank on the top for all my favrive keywords at all times in all engines.

I agree very much with you, webanimal, that this is not about BH or WH but about. It's all about having goals and dealing with whatever terms and comptetition is on your market.

hmm..."deserves" was the wrong word. "merits" would be a better word, and there are undoubtedly websites and pages that merit higher rankings for particular queries than others. For instance, the top ranked pages (sites) may have a lot more useful information in them for the query than mine has, and are much more useful to people than mine is. That's what I meant. I don't care about pushing them aside to get the 'relevant' site/page that I'm working on ahead of them, and I don't care if the 'quality' of the results is just a little bit lower on account of it. It's business.

I don't see much in the way of WH vs BH debates these days, but not long ago the WH die-hards would probably argue that the way to get an inferior quality site ranked higher than superior quality sites for for each little sub-topic is to convert the inferior site into being at least as superior as the competition - and then some. That's all very well, but many clients are perfectly happy with their sites, and they really don't want to pay large sums of money to add loads of unnecessary, but quality, content just so they can feel good about competing with the best sites on each little sub-topic within theirs - and still remain subject to every wind of algo change that comes along.

There are things I guess you could call unethical - things like click fraud, seo's lying to their clients, but these things are against the law. The search engines don't decide these things. The government does. IMO that distinction should always be made clear. Now, that's black hat/white hat.

In defense of "G" (as if they needed any), they have always been more than considerate and fair in my dealing with them. I recently submitted a complaint about something written in their help pages. It was promptly removed. I like to think this was because of my complaint. I don't believe they are purposely unfair. I just believe many seo's have been subjective and naive, and found themselves at the mercy of "G's" rules.

I wonder if there would have been so much discussion about black hats and white hats, if some of the other engines were as popular as "G"?

Also: labelling things white and black also is determined by what year this is.
What can help you today, can get you banned tomorrow.

Maybe I am a naive one, but when I pointed out Google's advice, I believe it does help you long-term. It is more a state-of-mind thing to me to rather work with them than to trick them.


They have a job to do just like us. I personally cannot stand it when someone has a site without anything good on it and asks me to get him ranked. Even when the visitors come, the conversion rates are still low and most of the traffic gets wasted. Why not do things that benefit you in more ways than seo? What it all comes down to is generating business. I can understand Google being displeased with seos when looking at some top results, while so much better resources are buried. I tend to push people to create quality while doing my thing. To meet me half way. I do believe that is most effective long-term speaking and a lot harder to fail that way.

Putting all of your eggs into one basket and then being nervous about upcoming algo changes is not my thing :)

Mike

I tend to push people to create quality while doing my thing. To meet me half way.

IMO if you create more quality content just for the purpose of getting a higher ranking, you are manipulating the results as well. And, unless you are very lucky, or have a very unique niche, you are going to trick the engine to get a higher ranking.

IMO if you create more quality content just for the purpose of getting a higher ranking, you are manipulating the results as well. And, unless you are very lucky, or have a very unique niche, you are going to trick the engine to get a higher ranking.
Hmm, I agree and disagree :)

In my case it started with a client who had a rediculously bad looking site where he was selling some vitamins. I managed to get him the rankings without any major changes to the site and targetted traffic at that. But his conversion rate was soooooooooooo bad and he started complaining. I offered a free redesign to keep him as a client after having put so much work into it and his answer was :

"Don't mess with the soul of my site" LOL

So after that, I have been testing potential clients on their business-savvyness. I try to make good changes with the search engines in mind.

whether SE rankings should depend on the quality of the site is a whole other issue though.

Surely SEO is the optimisation of a site to appear in search engines? The quality of the site is another issue. To me that 'other' issue is actually more important than SEO (because I can get customers to the sites in other ways but conversions are the most important thing) but honestly that isn't SEO.

This is another huge argument in the BH/WH issue, and it bugs me every time. WH SEO's frequently stress how important site quality and conversions are and they're absolutely right, but that's called usability and marketing. If someone wants to offer a hybred consultancy service incorporating those then that's brilliant, wonderful, what a lot of websites need, but it isn't a requirement of an SEO service and saying that SEO which doesn't incorporate them is 'bad' SEO is misunderstanding the service imho.

There are a lot of websites which convert really well and are infinately spiderable but don't appear high in the SERPs. If they employ an SEO then the site doesn't require a redesign (although yes of course it might need some changes) nor do the site owners necessarily need a marketing course. :)

I guess there a few fine lines there in the differences between site design, marketing, usability, and seo. There appears to be so many contradictions as well.

WOW!!!
I really was not expecting this type of response when i started this thread. All i can say is: wow.

The description of WH as being in a "cesspool" in the title of thread is probably what stirred up the hardest feelings initially. Perhaps nomas was looking to start a war, but, once again, I commend those who have participated in here keeping things on a civil level.


Well, let me begin by stating clearly that i had no intention of starting a "war". On the contrary. In fact i had initially started this thread for a completely different reason. I started this thread one day while looking through my keyword SERPs and getting very frustrated. I the eyes of most people, Google's Bourbon updated can only be described as ridiculous and unproductive. While analysing the new SERPs it suddenly dawned on me the it was quite apparent that Google have enforced and OOF (over optimization filter). It was obvious because my site was correctly formatted (h1's, good navigation, etc...) had, let's say, 100 IBL and contained no BH. My site was #5 for the Keyword. Now, looking at numbers 1 to 4, it was obvious that these sites had bad formatting (no h1's) terrible navigation, and only had, lets say 20 IBL.
Now, to clarify, when i started this thread i was hoping to get some information about this possible OOF. Like most of the "technical" threads of this group, we share our ideas, thoughts, intuitions, and understandings to help each other based on experience and testing.

Instead this thread turned into a morality war about BH vs WH. I guess if this aspect of my initial question was the one focused on, it means that it is this subject people are interested in talking about. I must say, it has being very interesting so far. Probably more revealing that anything we could have gotten into about OOF. So, great.

Anyhow, to put my two cents into the BH-WH topic:

SEO and SE are inevitably going to be in a cat a mouse situation. The internet started in the pure mind of the idealists, and has now descended into the corrupt mind of the materialists (read: capitalists). All this is simply, well, normal. This is the world we live in and there is no escaping the hard reality that there are X people that want to do good, and there are X people that just want to make money. The basic concept has being with humanity for about 200,000 years. It is part of our social nature.
At the end of the day, google want to provide relevant results. This is their business. Unfortunately, it is getting tougher and tougher for them to do this, i would venture to say almost impossible.
As i said before, this is a cat and mouse game that we are playing. My only consolation lies in my childhood memories of Tom and Jerry. The cat was always stronger and the dominating presence of the house, the guardian. The mouse was always the more clever, always finding was to use the household items in ways that they were not made for.

The cat never quite managed to get a hold of the mouse ;-)

Hi nomas and thanks for clarifying your thoughts. I agree that this thread is certainly quite interesting. I did not mean in any way to accuse you of trying to start a war, but that the term "cesspool" may have stirred up some feelings that were eveidne tin the first few responses. I certainly agree with your Tom and Jerry analogy. I feel that your WH sites will "rebound..." Keep the faith! :)

>The internet started in the pure mind of the idealists<

I don't mean to offend, but you could not be more wrong. The internet was started in the pure mind of the military.

>and has now descended into the corrupt mind of the materialists (read: capitalists)<

In defense of capitalism around the globe, why would a capitalist be judged to have a corrupt mind????? :confused:

>This is the world we live in and there is no escaping the hard reality that there are X people that want to do good, and there are X people that just want to make money.<

I often feel like I'm banging my head against a brick wall, but once again;, this assumption is wrong. THIS IS NOT THE HARD REALITY! The reality is there is not a situation where x people do this and others do that. It is a matter of degrees and the other persons' perception. The problem is not that we are each a member of one camp or another. A member of one camp could be a "little" good, just as a member of the other camp could be a "little" bad. The problem is that we take it upon ourselves to judge others without giving credit or allowances for our own perceptions.

>The internet started in the pure mind of the idealists<

I don't mean to offend, but you could not be more wrong. The internet was started in the pure mind of the military.You may be right, but I don't think so. The Internet was aided into existance by some under-the-table use of a U.S. phone company's systems - stealing, and it wasn't the military that were doing it.

Even so, I don't think he meant the Internet. I think he meant the web, which is different. The Internet is a network of computers - it's hardware. The World Wide Web (the web) is a system that uses of the network, and it was started/conceived by an Englishman who was working in Cerne at the time. Or rather, the idea of using hypertext in documents that were stored on the network was his conception. It did away with the need to know which computer a particular document was stored on, and made the retrieval of documents a whole lot easier. The web we know today sprang from that.

massa,
you are mostly correct. I'm sorry if i dragged politics into this, but mine was a mere observation. what i meant was: the web was started as an intellectual exchange of information. Once the business men got hold of it it mutated into what we find today.
I don't mean to pass a judgment on this in any way. This was a merely an observational comment.
(if i did have to pass judgment on this though i would have used a lot more vulgar words to describe capitalists, but i won't.)
Please let us not transform this thread into a political discussion. There are other places for that on the web. I am sorry if i started it. :(

hehe... Either way, it wasn't idealists who started it. It was merely a way of retrieving documents much more easily than was possible at the time. :D

>Please let us not transform this thread into a political discussion. <
My purpose in responding could not have been further from a political motivation. My objective was to point out the hard reality statement was not actually the hard reality. A secondary motivation was hopefully to get people to be a little more open-minded and allow others to have different opinions and ideas without being judged.

>(if i did have to pass judgment on this though i would have used a lot more vulgar words to describe capitalists, but i won't.)<

I wish with all my heart I was smart enough to understand man's need to find his own self worth in the deeds of others.

With this statement alone you clearly illustrate my point. Now it is obvious that even if someday, somehow logic and reason ruled and we could all accept that some silly hat distinction dividing the SEO industry never really existed in the first place, there would be something equally prejudiced pop up to take it's place.

How many so-called hat saints could we assume are also capitalists? So, now I can still believe I am good because even though we are both in the same business, they are vulgar capitalists while I am not. I believe that last sentence is some kind of oxy-moron by both being in business but only one being a capitalist but I'm not that grammatically competent to be sure.

I AM sure that my obsveration has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with human nature and how, ( as a capitalist who realizes that if the industry ever finally comes together, I stand to profit on a scale relative to the success of the industry as a whole), to overcome it for the purpose of doing the most good for the most people.

Why are people assuming that you can't be a businessperson and idealistic at the same time?

Most of the best, most successful businesses of all time were started by idealists who also realized that unless you are making money (or acquiring some sort of access to resources somehow) to support and promote the idea, you are not an idealist, you are a philosopher ;)

Capitalism, socialism and communism are not moral standpoints, they are economic ones. You can be good, indifferent or evil in each. Come to think of it, you can be good or evil in your ideals, as well. Let's face it, both Hitler and Mother Theresa were idealists in their own way, but had very different approaches and ideals.

Personal opinion,

Ian

Idealism is great, but without being business smart, you might be idealistically unemployed. A combination of being both has always suited me best. We're all in this for something, but the job gets a lot easier when you enjoy what you do and believe in it. I like the Tom and Jerry comparison:
The Bourbon update reminds me of the scenes when Jerry drives Tom nuts and Tom goes ballistic destroying the whole house and hurting himself :)

Idealism is great, but without being business smart, you might be idealistically unemployed.
I totally agree. with as many competing channels and constricting forces as there are on the web most people will have to operate doing some things that are not ideal to have functional business models, unless they have a strong brand and a deep love for their topic, or were in the right place at the right time.

I think that we will find the white-hat / black-hat distinction becoming increasingly irrelevant as (strict) SEO moves towards a more integrated existence with the broader scope of "Internet Marketing". This I believe, is the manner in which SEO will survive the next five years, during which time SEO will become more of a component than a campaign in its own right.

My personal definition of White Hat / Black hat would be to the effect of:

A ridiculous distinction that has been drawn within the SEO industry between SEO's who follow search engine guidelines when optimizing websites and those that do not: An ego crutch for SEO's that need a "good guy badge" to help avoid association with maligned SEO techniques. ;)

An ego crutch for SEO's that need a "good guy badge" to help avoid association with maligned SEO techniques. ;)I like that. It may not be entirely true, but I do like it :)

A ridiculous distinction that has been drawn within the SEO industry between SEO's who follow search engine guidelines when optimizing websites and those that do not: An ego crutch for SEO's that need a "good guy badge" to help avoid association with maligned SEO techniques.

I've never heard the SEO community described with such eloquence. Although, I wouldn't lay the blame squarely on the SEO's. The SE's, just by the nature of their "secret" algorithms, somewhat encourage a guessing game on where the line will be drawn.

I've never heard the SEO community described with such eloquence. Although, I wouldn't lay the blame squarely on the SEO's. The SE's, just by the nature of their "secret" algorithms, somewhat encourage a guessing game on where the line will be drawn.

I agree with the idea that search engines encourage the guessing game. The fact that it has gone on for so long is proof that a different approach altogether needs to be engineered. One that does not place SEO's at the mercy of search engine ambiguity.

Sometimes I wonder whether SEO's are at the mercy of SE ambiguity, or whether they exist *because* of it....

Ian

Everyone has a battle to fight, the search engines are trying to provide searchers with the best results possible and they feel threatened by many seo's. I don't see where that is so hard to get for many, nor do I see the need to stereotype search engine optimizers the way that it's been done here.

Everyone has a battle to fight, the search engines are trying to provide searchers with the best results possible and they feel threatened by many seo's. I don't see where that is so hard to get for many, nor do I see the need to stereotype search engine optimizers the way that it's been done here.

Goodguy badge shiny and polished...

a different approach altogether needs to be engineered. One that does not place SEO's at the mercy of search engine ambiguity

I agree. Considering that most search engines would rather not have or want the SEO community manipulating placement (at least, that is what I "guess" they want), most of us have altered our approach, as they have altered theirs.

Goodguy badge shiny and polished...
It's not about good or bad, but rather common sense and using it ...

It's not about good or bad, but rather common sense and using it ...


Indeed. See we agree after all.