Black & White Hat SEO and Why They Both Suck

A black hat is the villain or bad guy in an old western movie. He is the character wearing a black hat in contrast to the hero’s white hat. The phrase is often used figuratively, especially in SEO slang, where it refers to a technique that breaks search engine rules. Google says that white hat SEO is someone that would write copy, give advice on site architecture and help in finding relevant directories to which a site can be submitted. Anything else would be black hat.

While copy is very important, without links going to that copy, no one will ever find it or read it. And no matter how good the site architecture is, without some outside influences it want make any difference. And I am all for submitting sites to directories but the truth of the matter is, they have very little affect on getting a site to rank.

Here’s my two cents on white hat and black hat.
White Hat SEO

A white hat SEO charges you money and gives you very little in return. At best you get a website where they have optimized your copy and then submitted to the online directories as well as set up a good internal linking structure. All of this is important but it is not going to over flow your pockets with cash.
Black Hat SEO

Depending on how black they get, it can get very dark. They can build you a list of 50,000 keywords, put a bot together that grabs text from different sites, mixes it up, making it unique and then builds a page for each of those keywords, optimized for the search engines, over night. They have blogs and other cloaked sites as well as a site set up on every free hosting site online in place for linking to these sites. They can have you tons of good traffic coming to your site over night. You can be making money in a week’s time, if you have a good site that will convert the traffic. However, you stand a chance of your site getting band from the search engines a week later. All the traffic stops and no one wants to touch you.
My Thoughts on SEO

I build my sites for the site visitors and market them for the traffic. It’s Google’s job to make their search engines work, not mine. I’ve got no desire to build sites and cloak pages, not because it is wrong or want work but because I do NOT want to get a site banned. However, I agree with building a list of keywords and creating a page for each of those keywords with unique content one each page. I also agree with setting up an internal link structure that will let you pass the highest amount of pr to your best pages with your keywords for those pages being used as anchor text.

A site with 10,000 or more pages can even allow you to rotate your keywords for the internal pages.

But it’s all a waste of time if your site does not convert the traffic.