Search Engine Ethics
Borrowing from the wild west, white hat SEO generally refers to ethical techniques, whilst black hat SEO is unethical techniques. Search engines are designed to help people find genuinely relevant results for the key words they enter, in a ranked order. Relevancy is a mixture of the "authority" of the site generally and the specific relevance of the page content to the search made. Anything which undermines this (ie. by creating false impressions of authority or relevance) is unethical because it undermines the key purpose of search engines.
Black hat practitioners tend to see search engine optimization as a war, and search engines and SEOs as the enemy, to be beaten by means fair or foul. White Hatters tend to view search engines as friends, who can help them get business.
In their Guide for Webmasters, Google ask you to "avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, 'Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?'"
You can find on the web links from PR8 sites on sale for $200. From our earlier exploration of PageRank, you'll understand why such a high price can be supported. As you can imagine, Google and others frown on this activity, as it undermines the whole principle of democracy that underpins PageRank. Buying votes? Unethical!
The consensus in forums is that Google look out for unnatural linking patterns, including substantial cross linking, sharp growth in backlink numbers and same anchor text in most links. I would advise you avoid this sort of activity altogether!
Black hat practitioners tend to see search engine optimization as a war, and search engines and SEOs as the enemy, to be beaten by means fair or foul. White Hatters tend to view search engines as friends, who can help them get business.
In their Guide for Webmasters, Google ask you to "avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, 'Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?'"
You can find on the web links from PR8 sites on sale for $200. From our earlier exploration of PageRank, you'll understand why such a high price can be supported. As you can imagine, Google and others frown on this activity, as it undermines the whole principle of democracy that underpins PageRank. Buying votes? Unethical!
The consensus in forums is that Google look out for unnatural linking patterns, including substantial cross linking, sharp growth in backlink numbers and same anchor text in most links. I would advise you avoid this sort of activity altogether!
