Natural SEO’S Evil Twin Wears a Black Hat
09.03.09
The natural optimization of site contents is the best way to attract more visitors to a website via search engines. Higher rankings on search queries increase the possibilities of conversions and that’s why it is important to balance good, wholesome contents with proper natural SEO strategies. When done correctly, SEO provides quality information to the customer and is relevant to, say, Google, Yahoo, Bing and other engines. Good manners will take you places.
But there is always a dark side to everything: Back in the 90’s, search engines were young, naïve and full of hope. They had nothing but simple keyword-matching algorithms and a lot of growth to do. Picture the characters of Reality Bites or any early-nineties sitcom and you will have an approximate idea of how shallow, immature and self-centered primitive search engines were…
The first attempts of manipulating contents to attract the attention of these search engines were plain silly. Picture this: Someone would be looking for information about, for instance: lumberjack flannel shirts (it was the nineties and that are what we wore…). This person would type “lumberjack flannels” into a search engine. One of the matching sites was titled “FLANNEL SHIRT HEAVEN”. Sounds good, right? It’s got the matching keywords and the name is…
.. Ok, so the name is cheesy.
One click later, the screen is flooded with x-rated images that had nothing to do with flannel shirts! Or any clothes at all! What gives? Were you hacked and then re-directed to a different site? But… but… the page title says “FLANNEL SHIRT HEAVEN” and the URL matches!
So… what happened? The Black-Hat SEO attacked.
A young and naïve search engine full of hope and no experience was tricked. Many went through the same experience. Some of them grew to become real online juggernauts with complex algorithms. Millions of engines never grew up even when had all the potential. Some of them never made it at all.
So, who is this scoundrel that tore apart the life of many search engines and viewers?
“Black hat” was a term to address the villain in a cowboy movie since this piece of attire would clash against the white headgear of the hero. Figuratively speaking, “black hat” practices of search engine optimization are those that are unethical and detract from the user’s experience for the sake of higher rankings on search queries. For instance:
• Keyword stuffing: Filling a web page with loads of keywords that will attract the attention of search engines, even if these have nothing to do with your product. Flannel shirts were popular back then, so probably our Black-Hat SEO stuffed this x-rated site with the keyword “flannel shirt” ad nauseam because he knew that it would affect the search engines’ results.
• Hidden Text: Using fonts the same color of the background to hide text or hiding content in the ALT attributes. However, this hidden text could be used to enhance accessibility as long as there is a relationship between text and site. The white background of Flannel Shirt Heaven’s domain was full of hidden text not only about flannel shirts but also about baggy pants and steel-toed boots, (again: it was the nineties and that was what we wore… for shame…), invisible to the visitor.
• Page Hijacking: Creating a site with contents that resemble more popular sites, but used to redirect the visitors to fraudulent sites. So, back then, there was one popular store called Flannel Shirt Paradise, but a Black-Hat SEO created something called Flannel Shirt Heaven that resembled the original and would take the viewer to a different site.
Black-hat practices guarantee results, but these are short-term little achievements, since search engines penalize these evil ways by deleting sites from their indexes. However, there is a positive side to this: Black-hat SEOs helped programmers and designers to improve both search algorithms and content quality, not unlike hackers helped improve Internet Protocols.
Now you know. There is a dark aspect to everything and everyone, even to SEO.
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