Do You Wear a Black Hat or a White Hat?
Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 6:27 pm by Kathy Jackson
A long time ago (my grandpa tells me) every Saturday at the matinee movie attended by every kid in town over six-years-old, the cowboys rode across the screen (Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Randolph Scott, etc). It was easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
The good guys wore white hats and the bad guys always wore black hats - and the good guys ALWAYS won! I guess that is where the term ‘black hat SEO’ came from.
Black Hat SEO will get you in big trouble. And if you don’t know what Black Hat SEO consists of, you can be practicing it and not even know it. Here are two Black Hat SEO tactics that you really want to avoid:
1. Invisible or tiny text: Using text that is the same color as the background upon which it is printed makes it invisible. Using a font that is so small that it is unreadable also effectively makes text invisible. Hiding text behind pictures or graphics, likewise, make text invisible… and all of these techniques are considered Black Hat SEO tactics. Google and other search engines will throw you out on your proverbial ear if they catch you and it isn’t worth what little SEO advantage that it might provide.
2. Key word stuffing: Yes, keywords are important, and using keywords as often as possible is definitely a good SEO tactic. It is only a white hat SEO tactic, however, when the key words are used in a way that makes sense to the reader. The spiders are very, very good at spotting sites that are practicing key word stuffing, which is repeating a keyword over and over and over in an unnatural and forced way. We’ve all see sites like those, and we all know how annoying they are!
The point is, there are white hat SEO techniques that are just as effective as most of the black hat SEO techniques. The white hat SEO techniques also have the great advantage of being legit and “legal” according to search engine rules - and they won’t get you banned by the very search engines that you are trying to improve your PageRank with. So wear a white hat… and be one of the good guys!
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