SEO Wars III: Revenge on the Search - Black Hats War on the Search Engines
SEO wars are not really between practitioners of Black Hat and White Hat SEO. Both groups aim, simply, to help their clients by getting them as close to the top of search engine listings as they can. Other than occasionally commenting on the other groups tactics, White Hat and Black Hat practitioners pay little attention to one another.
No, the real war is between Black Hat and the search engines.
White Hat’s force is strong
Black Hat’s force is… forced
Black Hat’s techniques are in direct contradiction to the guidelines laid down by the search engines. Black Hat does not earn high rankings in the search engines, it manipulates the algorithms to force good rankings, regardless of whether or not the site may deserve them.
In the long run, White Hat gets lasting results through ethical practices and hard work. Black Hat often fails to inform its clients that their websites might actually banned from the search engines due to their techniques, many of which are of questionable legality.
Disposable SEO
Basically any website that Black Hatters work on, using their Black Hat schemes, are viewed as disposable domains. Black Hat gets quick results through the long-term sacrifice of the domain on which they’re working.
Make no mistake about it, Black Hatted websites will, sooner or later, be discovered to be breaking the rules and punished accordingly by the search engines. This punishment usually involves banning the domain from their listings.
This is a heavy price to pay, especially when you’ve invested a great deal of time into a website that may be representing your large business interests on the Internet.
Impatient SEO
“Fear is the path to the dark side”
These are the immortal words of Yoda (for the non-geeks amongst us, Yoda is a fictional character, and regular fount of immortal wisdom, of the Star Wars series, by George Lucas.)
The truth is that it is fear that leads SEO’s to Black Hat techniques. Fear that they can’t get results without cheating, fear that they won’t be able to live up to their SEO reputation, fear of losing business.
We can all understand this fear, it’s the fear that drives us. However Black Hat is the cowardly, selfish and immoral response to this fear. Where the rest of us study harder, work harder and do more, Black Hats cheat. They cheat the search engines, they cheat the system and, something SEO should never do, they cheat their clients.
So many practitioners of SEO suffer as a result of this, that Black Hat has earned the SEO industry as a whole an undeserved bad reputation.
Unfortunately this means that the rest of us have to work that much harder to get and keep business. In addition, we have to work ever harder to stay within the evolving guidelines and parameters set by the search engines to combat the Black Hatters.