Whitehat vs. Blackhat
by Will Bond - November 18, 2005 / 5:55pm View more articles
This week's A List Apart has a really interesting article about accessibility and search engine optimization. To sum it up, whitehat search engine optimization is more effective than blackhat search engine optimization. What exactly is the difference between whitehat and blackhat and why should you care?
Whitehat SEO is optimization of a site by making it simple, well written, accessible, and all around user friendly. Blackhat SEO refers to the approach of using SEO "tricks", such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, and landing pages. More often than not blackhat SEO ends up making your site harder for your real users to use. Whitehat SEO, on the other hand, goes hand in hand with usability and well implemented web sites. Whitehat SEO isn't really SEO at all, but it results in better search engine placement. Whitehat is really visitor optimization (VO).
Here at iMarc we recently revamped our website with a focus on making it easier to use and more concise. Not only is the content better, but we designed it using common sense principles. We used relevant title tags and accurate h1, h2 and h3 tags. Our html is xhtml 1.0 valid for cross-browser consistency and accessibility. We also started using more descriptive page and directory names. All of our news articles and communiqués have the headline in the url and title. There are lots of other little tweaks we did, but you get the gist of it.
But what point am I getting to? Try searching Google for any one of our team members. That's right, every team member comes back in the first six results for their name, and all but one are in the top three. Dave has a couple of personal sites that are very popular (including http://dave.imarc.net) and push his iMarc Team page down a little in the results. Oh well, I guess Google actually does return more relevant results first...
Between this and the spike we have seen in web site traffic since our launch, I think it is fairly safe to say that whitehat SEO is the best way to go. Not only do you get good search engine rankings, but you deliver what visitors are looking for. From what I hear that helps turn visitors into customers.
Whitehat SEO is optimization of a site by making it simple, well written, accessible, and all around user friendly. Blackhat SEO refers to the approach of using SEO "tricks", such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, and landing pages. More often than not blackhat SEO ends up making your site harder for your real users to use. Whitehat SEO, on the other hand, goes hand in hand with usability and well implemented web sites. Whitehat SEO isn't really SEO at all, but it results in better search engine placement. Whitehat is really visitor optimization (VO).
Here at iMarc we recently revamped our website with a focus on making it easier to use and more concise. Not only is the content better, but we designed it using common sense principles. We used relevant title tags and accurate h1, h2 and h3 tags. Our html is xhtml 1.0 valid for cross-browser consistency and accessibility. We also started using more descriptive page and directory names. All of our news articles and communiqués have the headline in the url and title. There are lots of other little tweaks we did, but you get the gist of it.
But what point am I getting to? Try searching Google for any one of our team members. That's right, every team member comes back in the first six results for their name, and all but one are in the top three. Dave has a couple of personal sites that are very popular (including http://dave.imarc.net) and push his iMarc Team page down a little in the results. Oh well, I guess Google actually does return more relevant results first...
Between this and the spike we have seen in web site traffic since our launch, I think it is fairly safe to say that whitehat SEO is the best way to go. Not only do you get good search engine rankings, but you deliver what visitors are looking for. From what I hear that helps turn visitors into customers.
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Why should we be designing sites for search engines? They ARE the middleman most of the time between a user's start and end location, but we shouldn't be bending our practices around how THEY think the Web should be, we should be building for our users. Search engines should bend around us.
And for the most part they do.
In my mind the jury is still out as to what our updates really mean of what Google thinks of us. Google's been known to reindex things every month and this version of the site was posted less than a month ago. I'd assume that a major overhaul of any sort pops you upward in the rankings. That and the introduction of RSS could accommodate our spike in bandwidth.
But then again, maybe you are right. Maybe we're all soon to be the "the's" of Google.com (although for me to be "the" Fred LeBlanc of Google.com will take a lot of work).
I'll quote a fun movie Dogma here with something that sums up how this ends:
Loki: I can spot a commandment breaker from like a mile away. Oh bet on it.
Bartleby: This from the guy who still owes me ten bucks over that bet about which was going to be the bigger movie: "E.T." or "Krush Groove?"
Loki: %@&# you, 'cause time is gonna tell on that one.
There's much speculation on webmasterworld about causes of yahoo bannings and penalties. Some claim Yahoo bans perfectly good content sites just for having a few affiliate links.