Who Says SEO Can’t Be Fun ?

In the search engine optimization industry, Black Hat refers to techniques that are against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Some spamming gimmicks do provide short-lived gains for keyword rankings, but the rogues get penalized eventually, just like they used to in those old-fashioned movies. A decent SEO consultant will stay away from unethical tricks even when a clients impatiently itches to cut corners and thinks he can outsmart the search engines.

At the same time, however, our SEO industry would be boring without Black Hat, just like a John Wayne movie without a bad guy. I actually enjoy studying some rogue incidents in a clinical fashion ; here are some thoughts.

I have to say some Black Hatters are quite smart and creative in trying to get where they want without incurring penalties ; sometimes they can even win the hide-and-seek game, albeit temporarily. Unethical SEO means experimenting, and exploring uncharted territories. It also takes an enterprising spirit to try to outsmart Big Brother, and some good acting to manage that wide-eyed, innocent stare after being caught red-handed and black-hatted.

Some cases can be quite entertaining. You can find many on Google Webmaster Help Forum . I came across one thread by a webmaster named, let’s say, Jane Doe, and trust me, you’ll soon see why I changed her name (who needs a lawsuit?). Jane complained that Google had delisted many dozens of her sites for no obvious reason. She claimed she couldn’t figure out why she was “mistreated” because all those sites were manually built, not auto-generated, and provided content on a variety of topics.

She listed several of the penalized sites for analysis. There seemed nothing wrong with them. If you took her story uncritically and at face value, it really seemed that Google had wrongly accused poor Calamity Jane of unethical practices.

Comments from helpful users poured in. One pointed out that many of the sites in question looked like they had been created primarily for the purpose of link exchange. In response to that, the webmaster explained that she hadn’t done it intentionally for PR or link popularity reasons since she “would have known that excessive link exchanges on the same IP block would be flagged.”

Wow. Was she really unaware ?

A reader “proved” Jane could not be White Hat because nobody could build, upload, let alone manage so many sites. And while such evidence would be inadmissible in a Court of Law as speculative (Lawyers, anyone?), it certainly sounds logical. With more people joining the thread and providing analyses, it became even clearer what happened: most of the sites were single-page or few-page affairs with nothing but several paragraphs of duplicate text, AdSense ads, affiliate promotions and exchanged links. That’s a serious breach of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, especially when we are looking at dozens of such sites. Black Hat wholesalers, as it were.

For a proof reader or a decent SEO person the mystery was not difficult to reconstruct: Our friend Jane had simply shuffled and reshuffled the paragraphs on corresponding pages of the different sites, with only minor changes within the text itself. She thought Google’s machines wouldn’t uncover the plot. A human might find out, she figured. But who cared about humans as long as Google was fooled ?

But, alas, Google wasn’t. (Hey, it had slapped even stolid, solid BMW not so long ago).

However, Jane still believes she’s innocent and wonders if she can visit Google and talk to the engineers in person to resolve the penalty issue. An amusing piece of wide-eyed chutzpah, reminiscent of the proverbial guy who killed his parents and then in court pleaded for clemency on grounds of being an orphan.

Who says SEO can’t be fun?