04 Jul 09 SEO SIMPLIFIED: What exactly is Black Hat SEO – I?

In the last two articles, we have been talking about Black Hat SEO, and about the techniques that are out-and-out classified as Black Hat SEO techniques. The thing we are going to talk about in this article will tell you that there is no such thing as absolute Black Hat SEO technique, at least not in theory. Black Hat SEO may mean one thing to one group of people while something else to another group of people depending upon the SEO school of thought they subscribe to. In the course of next two articles we will try to analyze what these SEO schools of thoughts are. Let’s begin with The Search Engine Policy Approach, and we will also cover The Unnatural Ranking Approach in this article.

The Search Engine Policy Approach

The SEO professionals who follow this approach to classify an SEO practice into either Black Hat or White Hat believe that the SEO technique used by a website should be in sync with the policies and guidelines set by search engines, at least by the ones set by major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN.

For an untrained pair of eyes, this approach looks harmless, and more real than any other approach, but there is a slight problem with this approach. And the problem lies in the difference between policies and guidelines set by different search engines, which essentially means, you cannot optimize your website for all the search engines at once. You will need to ask yourself, which search engine you want your website to be optimized for? For example: if you put doorway page (Read about Doorway page here), Yahoo will not have any problem with that, but Google is not friendly to doorway pages. It, instead, suggest using 301 redirects.

The Unnatural Ranking Approach

The subscribers of this school of SEO thought has gone too far in professing that any SEO practice that unnaturally boosts the webpage ranking should be considered Black Hat SEO practice. On the surface this sounds good, but if we scratch the surface even with a coin, the real picture starts emerging.

There are two problems with this school of thought:

1. The definition of “unnaturally high” is too vague to be accepted by everyone.
2. According to this approach, every SEO practice is Black Hat. Think this over to the end and you will realize the truth behind this claim. This approach of thinking makes all the H1, H2, H3, Alt tags of your website Black Hat.

With this thought , I am concluding this article, and in the next article, we will discuss about The Visitors Value Approach and The Property Right Approach of SEO classification.

Tags: Absolute, Black Hat, Black White, Classified, Doorway Page, Doorway Pages, google, Major Search Engines, Msn, Policy Approach, Problem With This Approach, School Of Thought, search engine, Search Engines Google, SEO, Subscribers, Sync, yahoo