Super Affiliate Marketing Blog

I’m not sure who coined the dark side of SEO as Blackhat “BH”, but I have a feeling it derives from the white hat and black hat label from the early hacker days. Because most people nowadays see hackers as someone who is evil and malicious, but really a hacker was just someone trying to learn more about computers, and gain more insight into it. Obviously once malicious hacking took place, it gave the term, “hacker” a really bad rep, so the good guys labeled the bad guys as black hatters, and themselves as white hatters.

Now, it’s a pretty well known fact that I for one am not against BH’s. In fact, I consider myself pretty well versed in the dark arts of seo. This isn’t like Star Wars where if you drift over to the dark side, you can never come back to the good side. It doesn’t work like that, even though most people think so. I am a firm believer that to be absolutely amazing in the entire art of SEO (because it truly is an art to master) you must know both sides, white and black. For people that swear by only knowing white hat seo and never meddling in black hat, they are either lying, because everyone gets curious sometime (and let’s not forget, some tactics labeled BH now at some point was considered legal and WH years ago) or they are selling themselves short by not learning as much as they can about SEO.

I think people need to learn both parts. Even if they are so anti-black hat seo, it’s something you have to learn just to know or seperate your methods and tactics with when optimizing a website for the search engines; And that’s another thing I’d like to get into. On WickedFire, someone posted some questions about what were the differences between white and black hat. Shoemoney made a very valid point, and said that he considers ALL SEO as a BH. Which he is absolutely right about. I don’t care if you are the straightest most ethical person in the world. If you are utilizing SEO on your sites, you are in turn using what should be considered BH. I say this because BH is defined as a way to manipulate the search engines to rank your site better. There are many forms of BH, but just like the hackers in the 80’s, every bad or evil part of seo is now dubbed as BH. I have to disagree, because when you are manipulating the engines to rank better for whatever keywords or industry your site is in, even if you are following every safe WH method, you are still manipulating the site so that you rank better in the engines. That right there is content and site manipulation with the intentions of changing your site and it’s content so that you can do better than the competition. Sorry if this sounds a bit confusing, but when you think about it, if you made your site for PEOPLE to look at and read and buy all of your crap and click on stuff, then you wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about what some search engine thought. Which is another issue, if the engines weren’t traffic powerhouses, and sites weren’t governed by their keywords, then no one would care about how their site looked for a bunch of spiders. They would make their site look as beautiful and conversion friendly as possible. This is actually how sites were back before the Florida update, and also back in the dot-com bubble days. I wouldn’t call sites like that very appealing to the standards of today, but back then, sites were developed and designed with people in mind, not search engines. Sites were flashy, had tons of those annoying gif’s that you only find being used on myspace profiles now, and all sorts of other crap. But the bottom line, was that these sites were made to convert people to whatever was being sold, and to feed information to people without a huge revenue intention.

But all of that changed when search engines started to become the place to find information and websites, especially when you couldn’t remember the name, or the type-ins you’d try didn’t produce a website. Back then, all you had to do was either submit the sites to the big engines (AltaVista, HotBot, Excite, Netscape) send a few links with your keyword as the anchor text, and stuff some keywords into the content and poof, you’d get a top 10 spot for any keyword you liked. This is where SEO first started, and while everything except maybe linking is mentioned is now considered BH or keyword stuffing spam, this is what SEO was considered.

So without writing another novel on the topic, the point I wanted to stress was that not all BH tactics are bad. In fact, I think each one serves it’s own purpose for a specific job. If you don’t agree with it, fine, that’s your loss. But to consider yourself holier than thou because you won’t do it, that’s just bullshit, and you’re the one losing out, not the BH guy. So whether you’re going to cloak, link spam, keyword stuff, or just dominate the shit out of some search engines for a few niches, go for it, and don’t feel bad. Because what is WH today, may be considered BH tomorrow.