Google Optimized for Google

One of our developers sent out an excellent link today: Google designed for Google. It's funny, and really excellent commentary on grey hat search engine hacking. Check it out.

Okay, you looked? Great. That was the fun stuff. Now for the boring stuff...


There are two approaches to search engine optimization ("SEO"), black hat and white hat.

White hat SEO is simple. Write good content. Make it readable for humans. Google will reward you -- slowly, but surely.

Black hat SEO attempts to game the search engines by reverse-engineering their algorithms and then creating web pages that are custom-built for search engines. In the past, techniques included stuffing meta tags into page headers, creating pages of "invisible" white-on-white text, stuffing keywords into image alt tags, and the like.

Eventually the search engines started penalizing these techniques, and shifting to other methods of determining relevancy, such as using incoming links as a measure of legitimacy.

Today, a common black hat approach is to create "link farms" of hundreds or thousands of web sites that link to each other and are stuffed full of keywords; they rise in rankings as a block, and SEO firms sell links in these farms to their clients. Problem being that search engines have started to penalize link farms, which in turn hurts their clients.

Next black hat SEO companies have cottoned onto blogging. Earlier this year, I could hardly type a search term into Google without getting page full of bogus results from synthetic blogs hosted by Blogger, Blogspot, et al, ad nauseum. It's gotten better lately, so I think the search engines have figured out this approach too.

So what about that "Google designed for Google" example I started with? What is it?

Grey hat, I suppose. It's satirical, but it's becoming pretty common -- SEO consulting companies make recommendations to their clients which result in ugly, cluttered pages in which the content is crowded out by the attempts to stuff keywords and social bookmarking attempts. Technically, it's not gaming the search engines, but the pages end up much less usable.

Even if you do manage to get some new visitors to your site this quarter, are they going to like your page and actually pay attention to you? Or are they going to surf right back out? Remember, more than a decade after the web was created, the Back button is still the most used part of any web browser!

When the search engines inevitably start penalizing your grey hat activities and you cease getting referrals, where does it leave you?


(See also: Beware the snake oil, stick to the content.)