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The Difference Between Gray, White, and Black Hat Techniques

There’s an easy way to remember the difference between gray, white, and black hat SEO techniques. In traditional westerns, the bad guys always wore black hats–the good guys, white. Guys with gray hats are not quite good, not quite bad. Here are some of the specifics that outline the differences in less simplistic terms.

Black Hat SEO

A black hat will typically engage in practices that are considered unethical by search engines in order to boost a website’s search results ranking. Some of these tactics include:
Keyword stuffing. This is accomplished on two levels–keyword stuffing in the content of a website, and keyword stuffing of a website’s META tags. This can bring about a desired result in the short term, but can have a devastating impact on your ability to continue to attract an online audience if your website is banned from a search engine.Adding invisible text. As simplistic as this approach sounds, it’s actually a technique that many black hat SEO practitioners utilize in order to stuff an online document with keywords without being seen.

This is accomplished by adding a bunch of keywords to a section of the web page, and hiding them by making the text the same color as the background. For example, black hatters will insert a long string of keywords in white lettering on a white background so that they can’t be seen by the eye, but will be picked up by a search engine.Link farming. This method is also referred to as spam-dexing, and attempts to raise a website’s search engine ranking by creating separate webpages whose sole purpose are to link to the black hatter’s website. Since the number of sites that link to your website help your search engine ranking, this has long been an effective cheat. But search engines, starting with Google, are starting to identify link farms and are taking decisive action to ban them.

White Hat SEO

Essentially, White hat SEO goes out of the way to avoid the kinds of schemes that the black hatters use to deceptively ramp up their showing on search engines. It avoids shortcuts and relies on tried and true methods to actually earn the coveted attention of search engine rankers and, ultimately, website visitors. This is accomplished through the following practices:
Relevant, compelling content. This is important because it serves to win over the two distinctly different–albeit crucial–segments of your audience: actual users and search engines, both of which arrive at accurate assessments of your website’s value and legitimacy through the quality of your content.Effective use of keywords. Web copy and articles aren’t shoddily written excuses to insert repeat instances of keywords and phrases–they’re actually informative, and use only relevant keywords. Non-deceptive META tags. The keywords entered into the page’s META data are representative of the keywords that appear on the page’s text, and aren’t manipulated in any way.

Gray Hat SEO

Toeing the line between black hat and white hat SEO methods, gray hat techniques are those that don’t blatantly cross the line into unethical territory, and in many cases can actually be arguably successful. Still, the fact that many of the methods employed are of a questionable nature separates them far enough from the straightforward and transparent guidelines that envelop white hat SEO. Gray hat SEO techniques include:

Using paid links. This is often done to get around the potential repercussions of participating in link farms. It works when one webmaster pays another to put a link onto their site, driving to the payer’s site.Limited keyword stuffing. This is sort of like the equivalent of driving five or ten miles over the speed limit–you’re technically breaking the law, but you’re doing it in a way so as to fly under the radar. Keyword stuffers should be aware, though, that just because you don’t flagrantly break the law doesn’t mean you won’t eventually get pulled over.

SEM Synergy Celebrates Its 100th Show

WebmasterRadio.FM is proud to celebrate the 100th episode of SEM Synergy Wednesday March 17th at 3pm Eastern and Noon Pacific, with a landmark live broadcast featuring hosts Bruce Clay, Susan Esparza and Virginia Nussey, who has served as the show’s executive producer since day one.

Listeners have been glued to their media players and iPods to catch the weekly message from the man who first coined the term “search engine optimization”.

The show has touted some fascinating guests including Matt Cutts, Avinash Kaushik, and Bryan Eisenberg.

The 100th episode promises to be a show that will allow listeners to interact with the hosts.

On behalf of WebmasterRadio.FM, we couldn’t be more privileged and honored to be working with the team at Bruce Clay first and foremost as a longtime sponsor, but as a partner in delivering high quality educational and informative programming.

We encourage everyone to join us for the live broadcast and interact with listeners in our chatroom as we congratulate SEM Synergy for being one of the best programs on the network.

Here’s to 100 more incredible shows!

Google Maps Scraping for Content

Critics of search engine optimization have long claimed that the practice of SEO would be eliminated as Google proceeds to introduce increasingly personalized and localized search results to its users. Those critics should spend some time reading cutting edge blog posts like this one by Mike Blumenthal. Google Maps: Now Adding Reviews from News Sites, Hyperlocal Blogs and Other Non Traditional Review Sources

Writing in his Understanding Google Maps and Local Search blog, Blumenthal takes a deep, technical look at Google’s new practice of scraping content from local news, review and event websites and applying that content to business listings generated through Google Maps.

With their newly implemented sentiment analysis, Google Maps is apparently now reaching across hyperlocal blogs, local portals and news sites and retrieving blog entries, general editorial reporting and even blog comments for inclusion as reviews on their Places Pages.

When it feels the need to add content to a local listing generated by Google Maps, the search engine might extract information from review sites, blog posts, blog comments or local news and events sites without the author’s permission. In other words, Google is using general comment as editorial advice and recommendation in local business listings found on Google Maps.

This method of information retrieval raises several levels of concern for consumers and business owners alike. Especially of concern is Google’s practice of presenting someone’s writing without context. In many cases, if a writer understood his or her views were going to be used as the basis for a business listing at Google, they might have chosen different wording.

In his blog post, Blumenthal cites several examples where Google uses information scraped from unrelated websites to fill into a listing generated by Google Maps and outlines how readers can check out if Google has used similar techniques in their local areas.

Naturally, SEOs and reputation management specialists will be interested in the effects of posts, comments and reviews in local news and event sites on small business listings though not necessarily for the same reasons. For SEOs, this practice gives another opportunity to boost a client’s business through another search channel. It also gives SEOs something else to help small businesses guard against.

SEGuru’s Great Big Organic (SEO) Tool

Memo: SEGuru’s Great Big Organic Tool

To: The busy webmaster and search engine optimization specialist on the go

From: SEGuru and WebmasterRadio.FM

Re:

WebmasterRadio.FM’s SEGuru, host of SEO Rockstars decided to open his tool chest and publish a page organizing his favorite SEO tools, reporters and checkers.

MyGreat BigOrganicTool.com puts several dozen free tools used by crackerjack SEOs on one page. It’s the tool box we use when analyzing our own SEO efforts at WebmasterRadio.FM and we’d like to open it up and share it with you.

With love and respect:
SEGuru and WebmasterRadio.FM

Three New WebmasterRadio Shows Debut in August

August is a busy month here at WebmasterRadio.FM. Along with our full scale coverage of the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Conference (complete with a full-scale SearchBash party), WebmasterRadio.FM has three new shows debuting this month.

WordPress developers and bloggers will be pleased to note, world renown WordPress expert, Joost De Valk hosts “Press This!”, a show featuring exclusive interview with fellow WordPress developers, topics such as WordPress hosting and SEO, and news on the latest plug-ins and updates. “Press This“ premieres August 4th and will air every Tuesday at 5pm Eastern/ 2pm Pacific.

For email marketers we have, “Inboxed”, an e-mail marketing program recently added to the network offering best practices for email marketing strategies. “Inboxed“ is hosted XY7 and Rapid Response Marketing CEO Kevin De Vincenzi, Marketing Director Jon Fondy and and email marketing expert Adam Young. The program airs Wednesdays at 5pm Eastern, 2pm Pacific.

“Search Cowboys” is a program that covers news on search engine marketing, social media and other related subjects. Based in Europe, “Search Cowboys“ will have a special interest in Search in Europe, and they will also feature bloggers from around Europe. The program is hosted by European search engine marketers Bas van Den Beld and Roy Huskies, premieres August 20th and will air every Thursday at 1pm Eastern/ 10am Pacific.

Bing+Yahoo=?: Decoding the Deal of the Decade, A Special SearchCast with Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan joins New York Times SEO Expert Marshall Simmonds on a special SearchCast tonight at 7PM Eastern (4PM Pacific) on WebmasterRadio.FM to discuss the Microsoft Bing – Yahoo Search agreement.

Dominated by Google for most of this decade, search advertising is a multi-billion dollar a year business. Google has commanded such an overwhelming share of the search advertising market for so long, Yahoo, Microsoft and others have been unable to present any credible competition and a sense of stagnation in the search marketplace set in.

Microsoft has been trying to strike a deal with a very reluctant Yahoo for over a year. Its attempts to acquire all or part of Yahoo was one of the defining events in tech in 2008. Yesterday’s announcement from Yahoo and Microsoft is the start of what will unarguably become one of the greatest shifts in the history of search.

To better understand the impact of yesterday’s announcement, Join Danny Sullivan and Marshall Simmonds live at 7PM eastern this evening (July 30) on WebmasterRadio.FM for a special episode of SearchCast.

The Benefits of BingYa!

Yesterday’s announcement of a 10-year pact between Microsoft and Yahoo! changed the trajectory of the search engine industry. Where there was no apparent competition in the business of search last week, the alliance between the second and third place search engines has at least laid the foundation for a credible though not necessarily dangerous competitor.

Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft’s new search engine Bing will serve algorithmic search results on Yahoo!’s network. Yahoo! will, in turn, take over the provision of paid search advertising and contextually based ad placement across Microsoft search and web properties. Microsoft will support Yahoo! with revenue guarantees for the next 18-months and Yahoo! cedes all its search technology, including its deep well of patents, to Microsoft.

Though Yahoo! will be taking over the paid search advertising end of the business for both companies, Microsoft’s Ad-Center will be the PPC ad-buying platform, replacing Panama, the platform Yahoo! spent the better part of the last four years building.

Yahoo! will be able to drastically reduce its expenses through employment redundancies and savings from no longer maintaining or improving its search technologies. Microsoft’s Bing gets instantly propelled to the #2 position providing about 1/4 of all search results.

In battlefield terms, Microsoft has managed to ally with a former foe in what can only be described as a mutual defense alliance against a much larger enemy, the equivalent of the Greeks and Visigoths getting it together to fend off advances by the Roman Empire. Microsoft has closed one battlefront in order to focus on the more pressing problem of a much greater one.

At first glance, observers note that had Yahoo! seized a deal offered by Microsoft last year, shareholders and employees would likely have been better served though Yahoo! would have lost total control of its destiny. There are many who might argue that Yahoo! had already lost control of its own destiny, a power pushed away by the combined forces of the markets, two clever competitors and poor planning in the first half of this decade.

Whichever the view, all agree something had to change. The coupling of Microsoft and Yahoo! will create seismic shifts in the various businesses and marketplaces surrounding the search industry. Let’s take a look at the various sectors immediately (or very soon to be) affected by the new-born beast known as BingYa!

Microsoft
The biggest benefactor of the deal, Microsoft has taken the number two spot in its bid to disrupt the juggernaut known as Google. It has also put itself in a position to slowly subsume the search businesses developed and previously funded by Yahoo!. After the introduction of its new search engine Bing in late June, Microsoft needed to find a way to monetize it. While it owned its own ad-serving platform, it had not developed the technology to properly serve contextual paid advertising.

Microsoft spent most of last year trying to purchase Yahoo!. Last year, Microsoft was offering nearly $40billion in total for all of Yahoo!. This year, it got the parts of Yahoo! it wanted, (search), without paying a cent. Financially, Microsoft has guaranteed revenues at Yahoo for the next 18 months.

Microsoft projects about $1billion in extra revenues per year under this agreement.

Yahoo!
It is hard to say how badly Yahoo! has fared as a result of this agreement but from where I am sitting, it does not look as good as it could have.

On one hand, the company survives with its name intact and the ability to focus on providing media to what is effectively the world’s largest content network. It also gets to continue selling paid search advertising, the literal golden-goose of search revenues. Yahoo! projects a combination of expanded revenues and cost savings boosting their bottom line by about $700million.

On the other hand, Yahoo! is no longer in the business of providing search results. Yahoo! is no longer an independent search engine. This must be a bitter pill to swallow for the company which was once the brand that represented search with one of the most talented development teams on the Internet. Yahoo! gives up a lot of technology and a decade’s worth of innovation. As Danny Sullivan has noted, Yahoo! suddenly looks a lot like AOL.

Google
It is very hard to say how this impacts Google in the long run. In the short-term, the deal will have no appreciable effect on Google which is by far the most popular and profitable player in the search industry. Google never had to take Yahoo! or Microsoft too seriously in the search-space as it has held an virtually insurmountable lead against its two largest rivals for so long. Google actually made more money in the second quarter of 2009 than Yahoo! made in all of 2008. On the surface, Google’s got nothing to worry about.

In the long-run, a rejuvenated Microsoft poses a couple concerns for Google. One is that Microsoft might actually get its act together on the cloud computing front and in mobile markets. Google is investing a lot of energy and money in developing an operating system and ancillary services for hand held computing devices. Google’s Chrome, Wave and Docs are all geared towards collaborative computing on hand held devices with documents stored on remote servers. That’s the basis of Google’s not-so-secret smash-Microsoft’s markets strategy. Now that Microsoft does not have to concentrate energy on monetizing search, it can throw more resources into its core businesses, operating systems and productivity suites. The deal with Yahoo! gives it a way to further monetize both in the long run.

Barring extraordinary developments, ten years from now Google will likely still be the number one player in the search sector.

Search Engine Optimization Experts (SEO)
Perhaps the sector with the most to gain and the most to lose from this deal, BingYa! has been widely praised within the SEO industry. SEO clients care about Google placements almost to the exclusion of placements on Yahoo! or what was Microsoft Live. I have the sense that SEO clients are as interested in Bing as other Internet users are however Google is where the vast bulk of search referred traffic comes from and therefore Google is front-of-mind for SEOs.

Bing is generally thought highly of within the search marketing community. It is a good engine, perhaps better than Yahoo!’s. It is also fairly easy to optimize for, relying on a number of common signals such as title, text, internal site structure and topical relevance from page to page within a site. Because Google has basically defined SEO technique for the past five years, optimizing for Yahoo! and Microsoft Live was always a second thought. The advent of a two-search engine system might increase the perceived importance of non-Google placements, especially when one considers that the combined reach of Yahoo! and Bing is nearly 30% of the total search market.

Paid Search Engine Marketing Experts (PPC)
The agreement between Yahoo! and Microsoft will have an enormous impact on the PPC business. Yahoo! is the world’s largest content network. Microsoft owns one of the world’s largest content networks. Combined, the two networks are too large to be adequately described. Imagine being able to contextually place advertisements throughout that network?

It is going to take between 18 – 24 months (after regulatory approval) to combine Yahoo! Search Marketing with Microsoft Ad-Center. When the two are merged, Yahoo!’s already developed sales force will use the Ad-Center platform to enable PPC advertising to the biggest passive audience possible. The real question will be, will Internet users actually choose to visit Yahoo! or Bing to conduct searches. Pushing contextual ads to content sites is one thing. Having consumers come to you and pre-qualify themselves before having advertisements pushed across their monitors is quite another.

I suspect the deal will turn out to be very beneficial to the paid search marketing sector and might further popularize contextual online advertising for businesses.

Traditional Media Players
Note to Disney, Time Warner, Sony, Fox and others traditional media makers; re: The Future

That thumping sound you hear is the last nail in your collective coffin being positioned or it’s the sound of consumers dancing on your graves. I’m not sure which because I can’t really hear that thumping myself. I only have your confused and often off-point descriptions and convolutions to judge the noise by and I can’t be sure you have the background to properly describe it in the first place.

Remember Lloyd Braun? He was the guy who worked for Terry Semel when Semel was chief Yahoo in the early part of this decade. He was nicknamed Hollywood Lloyd, in part because of his connections with the movie and music industries and in part because it was his job to collect professionally produced content for Yahoo!’s media network. His Burbank initiatives failed but the set of offices opened for his team remains.

You’re not going to see Lloyd again. He is rumored to be searching for the super-secret poker game Elvis, the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly and Marvin Gaye have going 24/7 in Bolivia. What you will see is a renewed effort from Yahoo! to capitalize on convergence. Expect it to be their mantra but don’t expect them to want to pay much for your media. It’s not media anymore anyway, it’s content now. Content isn’t worth as much as media once was. Get used to it.

The Yahoo! – Microsoft deal, for traditional media, represents a perfect storm of convergence and the ability to distribute internally monetized content. Where the traditional media businesses controlled distribution and made its wealth on excellence and exclusivity, the Internet allows anyone with access (about 1/4 of the world’s population) to be as excellent as their talent allows. Knowing that both Microsoft and Yahoo! desperately need to expand distribution channels and, knowing that both now have the ability to concentrate on either creating or acquiring those new channels leads me to believe we’re going to see something disruptive on the distribution front in the next half-decade.

End Note: I’m not even thinking about the video game market in this piece. That alone is worth another column and a lot of thought. There’s a number of other areas I’m not actually touching on in this piece. In the future, I want to think about display, real estate, news aggregation, instant messaging, file sharing, social media and a host of other patented tricks owned, operated or in development from Microsoft or Yahoo!.

BingYa!, aka The Panama Bing Thing

The mythical beast named Microhoo is no more! A very real one named BingYa! (also known as The Panama Bing Thing) has emerged in a stunning but logical agreement.

A deal has been struck between Yahoo! and Microsoft that, if allowed by Federal regulators, will immediately transform the search and online advertising landscape as we know it.

In the broadest strokes, (the actual deal is to be announced tomorrow), Bing will provide organic search results to the Yahoo! network. This will give Bing a nearly 30% share of search results served while giving Yahoo! a far larger inventory of search results to serve ads against.

Yahoo! will eventually take over Bing’s ad-inventory however that phase could take several years as literally millions of existing relationships, synergies and deals need to first be renewed, renegotiated or in some cases, undone.

Before anything past a major announcement happens, several regulatory hurdles will have to be crossed. This deal has a far better chance of actually happening than Google’s bid for Yahoo! last year did because it creates rather than stifles online advertising competition.

If these are the general broadstrokes of the agreement, a number of questions remain.

Yahoo!

What happens to Yahoo!’s already robust search technologies?

What happens to legacy patents such as the ones Yahoo! acquired when it purchased AltaVista years ago?

What exactly is Yahoo! going to focus on now?

Microsoft

How does Microsoft intend to monetize organic search results beyond paid search?

Is there an integration strategy around Bing and future Microsoft products?

When was this deal originally conceived? Is this a vote of confidence in the new management at Yahoo! or was the Panama Bing Thing a plan B after the trauma of 2008? Who’s idea was the Panama Bing Thing?

Both

Panama or Ad-Center?

How long does this pact last?

What defines success in this pact?

Where exactly will ads be served under this agreement?

Will we BingYa! or will be we Hoobing in the near future? Which to you two prefer?

An announcement is expected early tomorrow. We’ll bring you full details as they emerge.

Common Sense on PageRank from Christoph the Cowboy

Somebody had to do it…

Christoph C. Cemper, (soon to be a WebmasterRadio.FM show host on Search Cowboys), wrote a blog post, “Page Rank Myths in Linkbuilding“, that should become required reading for clients, newer SEOs and anyone else who believes that PageRank (as shown by Google) has any relevance to the actual ranking of a page in Google results.

Accompanying the post is a 9-minute YouTube video, “SEO Q&A: Page Rank Myths in Link Building – Extended v2” in which Christoph shares his thoughts on page-rank in a Q&A format.

Here are a few snippets from his post. It is well worth the read. (Please note, Christoph’s first language is German)

There are still too much myths and misconceptions regarding PageRank and its sense for link building in 2009. Some companies and “experts” still behave like we were in 2004.

…today I want to address five of this myths.

1. High PageRank has nothing to do with the Ranking of a Website

The name of PageRank often implies that it has something to do with the ranking of a website but that is not true at all. There were actually websites with a lower PageRank than other sites but they outranked them…

2. PageRank is never current

Even if you do look at PageRank and I tell you please don’t do it; what you see is 3 months old…

3. User don’t care about PageRank

Google actually doesn’t display the PageRank metric in the toolbar by default anymore for ages…

4. PageRank returns random data

Last year in June 2008 Matt Cutts, the head of web spam engineers at Google, confirmed that they do return random PageRank data. They make fun of people who want to check the data…

5. PageRank as metric for pricing

Don’t let you mislead when it comes to putting a price tag on a link. If you think about investing time and money in a link please keep in mind that the PageRank of a page doesn’t indicate its value…

As I wrote earlier, someone had to write this piece. Sadly, chances are someone else will have to write a similar one to remind people a few months from now.

A Web of Objects is the Object of the Internet

I’m taking a quick break from organizing the upcoming Affiliate Convention to write a cathartic, brain-clearing blog post. While I would optimally like to keep this blog updated daily, helping to coordinate a major affiliate marketing convention takes a lot of time and energy.

Affiliate Convention is not the only reason I haven’t been blogging as much lately. It’s occurred to me that I haven’t felt inspired about my understanding of the web for a while. This morning, I read a short quote in a piece at Search Engine Land by Greg Sterling from Yahoo!’s “search event” held in Sunnyvale yesterday that helped me gain some of my perspective again.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo! Search Strategy is quoted saying, “We’re moving toward surfacing real-world objects rather than documents,” while explaining Yahoo!’s renewed focus on upgrading the public’s perceptions of its search offerings by re-outlining its current ones.

The idea that the web is made up of objects more than it is made up of documents is not really new. What is new is how the combination of Internet technologies with web based documents and applications has created an environment that has vastly expanded the boundaries of web design and experience.

Traditionally, SEOs have tended to see the Internet as a collection of documents rather than the repository of all types of media. While it is easier to envision delivery of web-media as a part of a document, objects such as a YouTube viewer or a Twitter client deliver as much or more information to Internet users than do web documents.

I know it’s a simple point which was incorporated into my thinking years ago but as simple things go, it’s one I need reminding on every once in a while. From a search marketer’s perspective, the objects over documents idea is inspiring. Objects make better toys to play with! Even in a virtual world, objects tend to have more dimensions than documents.

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