What Is "Black Hat" Seo?

Let me just start off by saying that this is meant to be an article for laypeople, as I was intrigued by the time when I first found out about it and thought that I had to do some more research.  Most of the items written on the subject are written for SEO marketers and industry types, so I thought I should just take this information and drill it down to a level that anyone can understand.  No acronyms allowed from this point on!  

The basic definition of Black Hat Search Engine Optimization (which I will refer back to as “Black Hat”) is nasty tricks that the search engines don’t want you to do.  The thing that intrigued me the most about this term is that people were still doing it to start with.  I’ve always had certain things that I have avoided doing to keep my sites from being de-ranked or at worst, blocked from search engines, including but not limited to text the same colour as the page, doorway pages (oh yeah, I was real slick in 1997 folks), and evil keyword meta-tags which should never have the content that they did.  On the good side of the last item, I am now an absolute legal expert in meta-tag trademark violations, since I was involved in a lawsuit over this that dragged out for 10 years.  

What people are doing now has evolved beyond these items so far as to become a tad bit scary, its so genius.  I’ll spend some time on what exactly they do, but for now let us turn to the search engine and its ways, in order to better understand why Black Hat is even used today.  

The interesting thing about all of the old methods mentioned above is that they were yesterdays search engine optimization techniques, valid and legal in the search engine’s eyes at least, but they very quickly became items which you got rapped on the knuckles for.  A very good question is why.

There are two major components to a search engine’s business.  The first is having the best search methods that return the most relevant results for the end user.  That is what drives people to their site.  Remember when you discovered Webcrawler and what an epiphany that was?  Yeah, I date myself, but at least I buy myself breakfast in the morning.  Webcrawler was the pre-Google Google.  And everyone who did any measure of searching on the internet started to use it, causing the other fledgling indexes of the day some concern, because it cost practically zero dollars to run.  

The second component to a search engine is your advertising dollars.  Much has been said about the value of a budget, however small, so that you get some kind of preferred treatment.  In my experience this is not true with Google, so if that’s your corporate Black Hat plan you can forget it.  Most people in the trade know a few people with Google fridges (tschoke they send out if your budget hits a million in a year) and those people do not place any higher in the search engines than Ma & Pa Kettle from Idaho who have a budget of $500.00 to sell her jam online.  The devil is in the details, not in the dollar signs.  

Let’s turn back to number one then, having the best search methods that return the most relevant results for the end user.  The Web was a rosy place back in the day, when everyone started off just doing their websites and trying to make them look good before HTML 4.0 came along.  That was next to impossible.  Then some jokers started thinking tricky thoughts, as most humans do.  The thought process went something like this:

“Who is going to notice if I just put ‘Star T-er Voyage’ over and over again, in hidden text and my meta-tags, because I know that there is an absolute megaton of geeks searching the web RIGHT NOW for that term?”

And why not?  I mean really, seems brilliant on the surface.  

However, as an end user dying to find about Captain Kirk cavorting with green-skin aliens, think of how you’d feel if the first thing that popped up was “Ma & Pa Kettle’s Jam Shop, serving Deliverance Country for over 50 years”.  You wouldn’t feel too happy, and not specifically with the jam vendor.  You’d dislike the search engine that served you that crap on a plate.  And so they would lose you and you’d use another one, and all of those demographics that they sold to advertisers become big, fat lies, and they lose tons of money in stock.  Since the bottom line is important at all businesses, the search engines don’t like it when you screw with their results.

Therefore, if you do anything that a search engine considers shady, which is namely anything specifically designed to up your results rather than writing unique content for your own website on your own server, you run the risk of losing your high search results or getting banned from the search engine’s index entirely.  

This has scared off most “white hat” webmasters, including me, from doing anything that may be considered at all off, and constantly reading Matt Cutt’s blog to make sure that something we are doing legitimately now isn’t going to be banned tomorrow.  Matt Cutt works at Google and kindly drills down for the rest of us peons what we must be doing in order to remain in the admission line at the pearly gates of Google.  If you are at all interested in improving your results or even just in the inner workings of a not-so-evil evil empire, it is highly recommended.  

However a dark legion of incorrigible souls have arisen to do battle with the mighty search engines – the Black Hatters.  They are so named after the black-hatted character in the seminal Spy vs. Spy cartoons, because us internet people are such a very mature bunch.  Why do they continue to challenge the search engines when they have proved their power over every aspect of our lives?  

Black Hat SEO specialists are the hackers of today’s generation.  They simply want to see if they can get away with most of the stuff that they try, and the really cutting edge ones are in it to make gobs of cash, quickly.  While they aren’t quite criminals yet, they definitely are in the eyes of a search engine and if you use any proscribed techniques from a Black Hatter without their corresponding tech savvy, you will probably get banned.

So what methods do they use?  Nobody will actually tell you, because the real Black Hatters are like magicians.  They have closely guarded secrets that they use to make their money, and if these secrets become widespread on the internet, the search engines will shut them down faster than you can hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.  

Even my brief foray into the world of the Black Hat left me feeling rebuffed and poor – one Black Hat forum charges 100.00 per month for membership, keeping the casual knowledge seekers like myself permanently out of the running.  I would imagine that it all gets very exciting though – search engine execs versus the infinitely more nimble and tech savvy black hatters, kind of like a James Bond film where James Bond actually knows something about computers.  

The only technique that I could actually pinpoint, if it is a technique at all and not just a feint for the unwashed masses, was an article on how search engines revere and hold holy major university domains such as www.stanford.edu, due to the excellent content and internet legacy embodied therein.  What some Black Hatters do then, is set up doorway pages (that’s right, they are still using doorway pages – 1997 isn’t that far back now is it?) at a sub-directory on one of these esteemed domains, and redirect it to their sites of Black Hatted choice.  Of course the trick is how to get a domain at Stanford without admin rights, but this is where the “Black” part of the name comes into play – it isn’t legal.  

Therein lies the rub – Black Hat SEO does use illegal and barely legal methods to upset the search engine results in their favour.  This automatically disqualifies most of us from the use of those techniques, as most people involved in coding and the internet world may not be able to fend off new girlfriends or boyfriends who can bench press 400 lbs.  All we can do is monitor any websites for a hint of information on what they are doing – so that we can learn to think like them in our White Hat world.