Search Engine Optimisation is split into two kinds – “White Hat” and “Black Hat”. White Hat SEO is optimisation that search engines encourage as they would consider it adds to the integrity of search results. It is considered that White Hat SEO adds to the user experience by creating relevant content rather than content intended purely to ‘game’ search engines.
Black Hat techniques aim to manipulate the search indexing process in a manner deemed unethical (although not illegal). An example of a Black Hat technique is ‘cloaking’ whereby a different website appears to the search engine than to users. The page appearing to the search engine is heavy on SEO techniques, whereas the user sees a “clean” page.
Google can find out about black hat SEO techniques through three ways: firstly through its own investigation practices (manual and by algorithm), by competitors reporting them, or the media reporting on them. An example of the latter was the New York Times article on JC Penney’s activities in the run up to Christmas 2010. They had set up a huge link farm – a collection of websites set up purely to link to the JC Penney site to improve its natural search rankings. It was wildly successful and sent the company to the top of the natural search rankings for products across their range. When Google were alerted to this, they dramatically reduced JC Penney’s search rankings. This highlights the nature of Black Hat techniques – they can have a big initial impact on search results, but this impact is short lived and can result in a worse position than before in terms of rankings.
Search engines are constantly on the lookout for Black Hat techniques. Google have instituted several programmes to combat Black Hat techniques, the most prominent of which being Panda and Penguin. Panda changed Google’s search algorithms to promote sites with genuine content such as social networking and news sites, over sites featuring large amounts of advertising. “Scraper” sites, which pull in content from other sites, legitimately or not, were demoted. Around 12% of rankings were affected. Google have published 23 questions to guide website owners how to produce content that will be highly ranked – examples are “Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?” and “Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?”
Spamdexing involves deliberately deceiving search indexes. There are two types of Spamdexing – Content Spam and Link Spam. Content Spam involves changing the content of the website in question – by for example including hidden text designed to be picked up by search engines, or Article Spinning – rewriting other content available elsewhere on the internet. Link Spam involves arranging for other pages to link to the website. This could involve hidden links or buying expired domain names, for example.
When Google find examples of Black Hat optimisation, it imposes penalties on the offender. The site will drop immediately in the rankings, in many cases out of the top 100, or in extreme cases it can be completely de indexed. Google’s penalties have become more severe over the years. There have been some sites who have complained that Google are not helpful enough in telling them what made the site fail Google’s standards – but if they did, I assume that Black Hat would be easier to accomplish. What the web marketing community agree on, however, is that Google’s crackdown has had a noticeably positive effect on the quality of search results, Google’s key asset as it maintains its dominance of the search market.
0 Comments