From the archives…
Last week at SES, I sat in on the Black Hat, White Hat session. The panelists gave their definitions of “white hat” and “black hat” SEO, and then talked about particular techniques, such as paid links, and whether they thought they were OK or not. The panelists talked about shades of gray and the lack of rules and the need for experimentation.
I come from a background of working at a search engine, rather than from a background of being an SEO, so I may see things a bit differently than those on the panel.
White hat = no guidelines violations
Generally speaking, I don’t see a lot of shades of gray in this discussion. The search engines have published guidelines (and while I was at Google, I spent a lot of time expanding the descriptions of those guidelines to help make them clearer). Violate any of those guidelines and you risk having the site removed from the index. That’s pretty black and white.
Related discussions have more shades of gray
I do see shades of gray in different discussions, such as:
- Do all the guidelines make sense in today’s technological environment? For instance, are there valid reasons for cloaking that don’t manipulate search engines and deceive users, such as showing search engine bots a canonical version of a URL and different versions of that URL to users for tracking purposes? For discussions like this, there’s a reasonable debate to be had about whether search engines should consider different rules, but too often, I see the discussion tally up the reasons why a technique isn’t deception then conclude that it is therefore, white hat. But whether a technique “should” be OK and whether it’s white hat are two different discussions. With regard to cloaking, that’s currently against Google guidelines regardless of intent. So justified or not, it’s not white hat with the current set of guidelines.
- Do techniques that violate the guidelines work? Often, I see the discussion of black hat vs. white hat veer into a discussion about what techniques are most effective: which ones work for enterprise sites or affiliate sites or sites in highly competitive areas. This came up at the panel, when someone talked about how they didn’t believe that a completely white hat site in one of the three Ps (porn, pills or poker) could rank highly. Again, this is an interesting discussion, but a different one. Techniques that violate the guidelines may eventually get the site banned, regardless of their initial efficacy, so it’s important to understand the long term goal of the site before engaging in them. As the panelists noted, sites that are in it for the long term likely want the slow and steady approach.
- What about techniques that violate the guidelines but are commonplace? I hear this discussion integrated with the hat discussion as well, often when talking about paid links. Paid links aren’t black hat, I sometimes hear, because everyone uses them and they’re vital for ranking success. But again, whether or not a technique is commonplace is somewhat irrelevant to question people are asking when they want to know what is white hat. Paid links violate the guidelines (at least Google’s — the other engines aren’t quite as strict), so they can’t be considered a white hat technique. A different, but valid, discussion is whether all paid links should be against the guidelines.
While all of these discussions and more are certainly valid and useful, I feel the trouble comes in when people have these discussions as the discussion about what is white hat and what is black hat. When people who aren’t experienced in the intricacies of SEO look for information and they see statements like “these are white hat reasons to cloak” and “all paid links aren’t bad”, they can be led astray and think that those things adhere to search engine guidelines.
What are the guidelines?
As for the SES panel, I respect all of the panelists and felt they all had interesting, useful things to say. But for me, the question at hand is simple to answer. Techniques that violate the guidelines aren’t white hat. They may be effective (at least for a time), commonplace, non-deceptive, or justified, but that doesn’t make them white hat. To me, white hat is anything that doesn’t put the site at risk of being removed from the search index.
When I was at Google, I spent a lot of time expanding the guidelines, detailing examples, and providing options of techniques that didn’t violate the guidelines. Since then, Google’s continued to expand the information and make it even more helpful. Check them out, and in particular, click the links under the “quality guidelines – specific guidelines” if you want to read up on the details.
What is SEO?
So what is white hat SEO? The panlists agreed it was about creating quality content — being the most relevant result for a desired query. I absolutely agree, but SEO is also about making sure the site can be easily crawled and indexed by search engines. From a search engine perspective, the best site in the world is unlikely to rank if the bot can’t extract any content from it.
16 thoughts on “What’s Really Black Hat Anyway?”
“Give that man a see-gar!”
I too have been amazed at this continuing debate about what is or isn’t black hat. The definition is pretty clear, as are the guidelines. I come across clients who are often confused because of discussions of grey areas, just as you pointed out.
Trouble is, there are many SEOs who want this debate to provide some form of justification for their own actions. “Yeah, I use paid links, but they aren’t as bad as the ones Google really goes after, are they?”
I agree with you that the debate should be about whether the guidelines need to evolve to include other techniques if they are shown to be in the best spirit of search relevance – not whether the current status quo endorses certain practices.
I define black hat SEO on my blog as: “Black Hat search engine optimization is about finding and aggressively exploiting the vulnerabilities of search engines.”
Seems like I spend most of my time trying to defend natural organic white hat SEO, than trying to figure out why website spamming is not acceptable.
Well very true – “But for me, the question at hand is simple to answer. Techniques that violate the guidelines aren’t white hat. They may be effective (at least for a time), commonplace, non-deceptive, or justified, but that doesn’t make them white hat. To me, white hat is anything that doesn’t put the site at risk of being removed from the search index.” And with so many theories floating around, it is very easy for a person with shallow or incomplete knowledge to get influenced by stuff that justify some of these actions.
To cut a long story short, if a website is optimized for humans it is sure to get high rankings.
Thanks for this article. In addition to Black Hat SEO definition, I have written an article on my blog about the best means to ruin a website 🙂
http://blog.ramenos.net/en/how-to-ruin-a-website/
I find this notion of a ‘guideline’ that can be ‘violated’ confusing…
I wonder if use of the term ‘guideline’ is responsible for a lot of the confusion in general. Laws and rules are black-and-white and behaving differently constitutes a ‘violation’.
Guidelines are, by definition and common understanding, meant to be flexible and breakable if circumstances warrant. As in ‘remember, these are just guidelines’.
Because guidelines are not black-and-white, it seems odd to define ‘white hat SEO’ as things which do not ‘violate’ them…
st stephen – You bring up a good point. The use of the word “guideline” vs. “rule” may be confusing. I think the underlying idea of why Google uses that term may be that they aren’t trying to set up rules for the internet. Rather, they are saying that their goal is to provide the most relevant results for searchers and towards that aim, they use certain criteria for determining what pages of the web to include in their index. The “guidelines” help site owners understand what that criteria is.
In addition, Google has the additional hurdle of wanting to be as transparent as possible to help site owners, yet not be so transparent that they provide too much information so that those so inclined can game the system (resulting in less relevant results for searchers, and thus the opposite of their goal). So they can’t provide a set of concrete “rules” that spell things out too much.
So we’re left with a situation where Google provides “guidelines” that are descriptive as possible with an explanation that sites that don’t adhere to those guidelines risk removal from the index.
I like this post, thanks. One thing that really kills me when I look at the whole white hat black hat debate is link building. The serps are full of results that are being gamed in such an obvious way it’s hard to exercise restraint and not just follow suit.
I know Google for reasons of scale have to fix this with an algo but even reporting link building tactics outside the rules has no impact and the sites stay put. I despair.
d
I think defining White Hat that way describes an obedient follower of not only T&Cs but all suggested methods – eg. nofollow
Black Hat has come to be known as those that break the rules – whose rules and – as GrayWolf points out “Google is not the law” – are they breaking any laws?
When countries allow advertising but Google restricts it – what is the color when doing what’s legal?
As was mentioned during the session – if you are not testing the boundaries and in some cases crossing them – you are not doing the best for your customers or your own knowledge. Even if just through a small personal site that can get answers.
“With regard to cloaking, that’s currently against Google guidelines regardless of intent.”
Thanks for the clear statement.
My feeling is that sentences like
“Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.”
are what opens room for speculation. Because some people read this as “As long as a page provides value for users, you can index it.” An what provides value for users or not has a lot of shades of gray, in my opinion.
Apart from that I agree that what should be allowed by the guidelines and what currently is allowed are two different issues.
I agree with you analysis of White vs Black. I came out of the search engines as well, working with Superpages and a variety of local oriented projects. The understanding of quality vs exposure is an entirely different mindset when you are weighing the factors of thousands of websites in a common category.
Sphunn! Sphinned? Nice article and great perspective
I wrote a piece about why the world needs SEOs that very closely relates to this ides of truly black hat vs. white hat. http://www.seobrien.com/2007/10/natural-search-seo/why-the-world-needs-seos-or-google-only-works-in-an-efficient-market/
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I am amazed that so many people think the line is clearly drawn between black and white, no offense, Vanessa. But rather than go into that overdone debate I have a clear and easy solution that would help everyone, when a guideline has been broken, including Google. If a site has been banned or penalized, let the owner know why. Google has applied a penalty, so why not state in the webmaster tools, why the ban or penalty was applied and let the site owner fix it. Google makes you guess and this isn’t fair when the owner may not have known or the guideline was interpreted differently. So easy, yet Google won’t do this. Why?
The use of the word “guideline” vs. “rule” may be confusing. I think the underlying idea of why Google uses that term may be that they aren’t trying to set up rules for the internet. Rather, they are saying that their goal is to provide the most relevant results for searchers and towards that aim, they use certain criteria for determining what pages of the web to include in their index. The “guidelines” help site owners understand what that criteria is.
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Hello! can’t find your contact, so I thought I will use this, anyway, we got a private webmaster forum ready to roll in a weeks time, pm me if you’re interested.