People talk about white hat seo and black hat seo all the time in the search engine optimization industry, what do they mean? Specifically, terms like white hat seo sound like they apply to hackers and malicious virus programmers, why are they being applied to the advertising industry? This is a great question, and I have read everything I can find related to the topic.
I mostly see confusion and misconception.
There seems to be a great deal of fear out there related to not being "good" if you are a consultant in this space.
You would hate for something bad to happen to your clients' web site, or worse, the performance in the search engines to suffer significantly.
And many turn to Google for clear definitions on this topic because they are the market leader in search engine usage.
I'm not sure why that gives them the authority to define the ethics of Internet advertising activities, but it seems to in many people's eyes.
I've looked to Google for clarity on the topic, but this has not been great.
Sure, they have guidelines for webmasters and everyone should read them.
They offer some helpful information on what is considered "okay" and what is not considered white hat seo.
But they are also have a number of very vague statements such as "don't have multiple sites with substantially duplicate content.
" Well, what does "substantially duplicate content" mean? If I run two blogs about running where we discuss different running shoes, is that substantially duplicate content? I understand that some people take content and post it to thousands of different web sites and we all agree that this practice is duplicate content and is bad.
But these are extreme examples.
Where is the line? What if the content is posted to 25 web sites? Too many? Not enough to be bad? This entire discussion starts to feel very slippery and without objective anchors to define activities.
Perhaps this is how Google likes it? It does serve their purposes.
In the end, the term white hat seo is not helpful to me.
First off, it was stolen from the hacker community and is really better suited to describe internet security.
Second, I can't find a clear definition on what it is anyway, even from Google.
One of my favorite quotes is: "more and more white hat seo is nothing.
" I laughed out loud when I read that because it is somewhat true.
But what's really true is that search engine optimization is such a new industry that it is without any solid definitions.
That's the real reason for the confusion and that will be corrected over time.