One of the most controversial statements made at the recently concluded SES London convention was that Black Hat SEO methods are the wave of the future. Forget all the rules of online optimization and paid search. White Hat methods are fast becoming a thing of the past. For those of you who don’t know the distinction between the two (and how could you not if you’re into SEO?), White Hat marketing methods are considered those which are fairly safe, unobtrusive and, most of all, legal. Black Hat methods on the other hand, while not all illegal, can result in severe penalties from search engines.
One example of a White Hat method would be designing a number of content rich sites and having them all link to each other. A Black Hat method is having multiple landing pages which all point to your homepage. This is done in order to boost the number of inbound links, and therefore the page rank. Is it effective? Undoubtedly it is, and it’s the fastest way to get a bunch of links coming to your site. The problem is that if the search engine finds out that your landing pages are devoid of any real value they can drop your site like a hot potato, and even blacklist you.
Maybe the answer lies in finding a common ground between the two. After all, there’s a loophole to practically anything. There must be some way of merging the effective Black Hat methods with the acceptable White Hat methods.
Subscribe to our blog to receive new posts and updates by Email
