Drawing the Line on Black Hat SEO
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Why should you avoid doing black hat SEO? Well, one reason is that it can get you sued. But wait a minute, aren't standards changing all the time as to what is "black hat" and "white hat" SEO? So how can we be so sure we're staying on the right side of the line? Keep reading to find out.
"Judge not, lest you be judged"
The Bible
What line?
In Loony Tunes cartoons, a hilarious Bugs Bunny always crosses the line that hapless Sam draws on the ground. He also manages to escape Sam's shotgun (fur and all) by the end of the episode. In the wild, wild world of search engine optimization, crossing the line could cause search engines to ban you, and customers and web sites to sue you. This leads to loss of money, loss of time and worst of all, loss of credibility in an industry where credibility could very well be your most important asset.
But really, what line?
What black hat SEO experts do is never illegal until they do it. Spamming became illegal after the fact. So did page jacking. And link farming through unrelated sites. It seems the black hats came first, the rules came after. And the same continues through today, the regulators coming a clumsy step behind the manipulators.
The Internet seems to have been with us forever, but the first time I acquired an email address was in the late nineties. Internet connections were quite expensive, and search engine optimization did not exist formally. Then the dot com boom (and bust) occurred, and web sites discovered the need to optimize for search engines, and SEO experts became the new gunslingers in one of the wildest, most unregulated media ever. More domain names are registered in the US than companies. The ratio of websites that fail is faster, and websites do not have to pay taxes to anybody (if the businesses are located in no-tax areas). Policing on the net is done by...who? Users, auction companies, email providers, website owners, search engines, the government. Simply put, if you have enough clout, you create your own policing and security features.
The lines are many, and indeterminate in their distance apart. Philosophy had to be brought in to resolve it. The ethics of the website designers and SEO experts was used by search engines to determine who got banned and who did not. The line was created, and everybody drew breath. Finally there was black and white!
Next: Who drew the line? >>
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