Black Hats for Newbies

[Mandy Boyle]

According to UrbanDictionary.com, SEO is defined,

“Like Voodoo and Witchdoctors, SEO is an evil term used to describe the ways SEO Optimizers believe they can beat the system by making you believe they know what will get your search ranking to the top. Most of the time SEO is achieved by throwing darts or mixing chicken bones with blood.”


Well, not quite.

Being an Advertising and Public Relations major, I often hear things about “spin doctors.”
SEO specialists, like PR practitioners, have a bad rap because of one bad apple spoiling the bunch. For PR, it was the embellishments made by people like P.T. Barnum and reactions to crises like the Exxon-Valdez disaster. For SEO, it's black hat practices.

So what exactly are black hat practices? Let's break into the SEO glossary:

Black Hat
SEO tactics that go against the best practices of the industry. These techniques usually break search engine rules and regulations, create a poor user experience, and present content in an unethical manner to both users and search engine spiders. Some popular methods include keyword stuffing, invisible text, and doorway pages.

Keyword Stuffing
This tactic packs long lists of keywords into your site to raise your search engine ranking without any relevant content.

Invisible Text
An SEO black hat tactic of attracting search engine spiders by putting lists of keywords in blending text and background colors (e.g. white text on a white background).

Doorway Pages
A black hat practice of creating misleading pages that users will never see, but can still be crawled by search engine spiders.


Industry best practices are best practices for a reason. If you want results that work for you and your brand image, stick with ethical practices in SEO like link building, social media optimization, blogging, and producing informative, relative content. Trust me, there's too much gunk to sort through when it comes to relevant content - don't just be another clog.

Your clients will appreciate it when you are informative and provide a useful service to them beyond supplying products. Think of your SEO campaign as a living, breathing customer service representative that's ready to say, "Can I help you with anything?"

Answer your customer's questions, provide them with useful info, make yourself accessible, and you'll find that it's another job well done at the end of the day - without having to wear a hat.

[jeff.stolarcyk]

These sorts of tactics are especially useful in figuring out whether your prospective SEO knows what he or she is talking about, too - tricks like keyword stuff haven't been relevant for a long time.

That doesn't mean that every Black Hat is living int he 90s. In fact, some of the stuff that modern black hats do to get links/PageRank/visibility in the engines' indexes is very savvy and incredibly clever. Which is great, except that a lot of it is either debatably or explicitly illegal, and it's only a matter of time until the engines catch on - or a competitor's SEO reports your site.