Black Hat Search Engine Optimization: User Beware

All web masters understand the importance of search engine optimization and the effect that it can have on the revenue of their web site. The differences between white hat and black hat search engine optimization is what someone is willing to do to gain income from their web site.

White hat web masters try to make their sites as user friendly as possible while providing good content to their site visitors. They want you to find what you are looking for in a timely manner and find the content useful and enlightening. A white has web master tends to go by old school customer service values. They hope to gain income from their site due to people returning frequently to see what is new and useful on the site. Webmasters that rely solely upon black hat search engine optimization techniques tend to scrimp on quality in search of a quick profit.

On the other hand, web masters that use black hat search engine optimization techniques tend to think more along to lines of making a quick buck. They use scripts to make 1,000's of web pages every day without concern to the usefulness of the information that they are putting on the web. The black hat search engine optimization sites depend upon ad placement in known "hot spots" in order to gain as many clicks as possible to generate income. Most black hat search engine optimization sites are generated via a script and the content on these sites consists mostly of "scraped" articles from several public domains that offer content distribution. Often the content does not make sense and ends up being a page that is randomly splattered with targeted keywords. While this setup may bring a few quick bucks, search engines such as Google have been cracking down on such black hat search engine optimization activity.

Black hat sites are frequently banned or removed from search engines completely when they are caught using black hat search engine optimization tools. The problem is that it is so easy to generate these websites that a web master can crank out 1,000's of pages a day thus staying one step ahead of being dropped from search engine rankings for the use of black hat search engine optimization tactics.

So how is a web master supposed to compete with these black hat search engine optimization sites? It is common to see a mixture of both types of search engine optimization in a site and this may be the best way to go. Page building is slower of course but by offering good, original content, the web site pages are less likely to be dropped from search engine rankings or penalized for using black hat search engine optimization techniques. Instead of automating content by using scrapers and keyword harvesters, maybe a simple web template could speed the process further without compromising the integrity of the web master.