Definition of Blackhat SEO

[Bruno]

I have read a lot about it, but i have never try anything from that perspective, that's just not for me, but i keep getting questions about it and i see that a lot of people have wrong definition of Blackhat SEO.

Example, is search engine submissions blackhat SEO? To me that's just stupid service which most of "SEO" companies charge. Is hidden text BH SEO? or some stuff like that? To me that's not SEO at all, that's just ignorance.

Can you give me definition of BH SEO? What tactics most of BH SEO use? Any articles about it, links?

[eKstreme]

There are many ways to define it. One simple one is: Black hat is anything the search engines say is naughty.

Beyond that, it'll boil down to semantics and questions about where to draw the line. This is confusing and not very productive, so instead of black hat, I use "darker then white".

Not that there is 100% pristine white hat.

Pierre

[Bruno]

I don't even care about BH & WH, but most webmasters do and most popular news and business sites first write about that when they talk about SEO. I get to many question about it and i don't know why .

[Mano70]

It's a very tricky question Bruno because the answer isn't black or white. In a thread in the Google groups about Flash optimization Google said that it's the intention that defines if it's spam or not - not what you are doing.

Not an answer to your question, but personally I think this is a term that should be buried since SEO means Search Engine Optimization, and Optimization means improvement. If you are doing BH you aren't improving anything, you are just spamming. If your ranking goes up because of spamming, that isn't optimization because you haven't improved the relevance in the SERP and my user experience with the SE's. SEO is more than just ranking IMO.

[Bruno]

Yes, i agree, for me SEO is SEO, and BH SEO is spamming, nothing else, but that's not my question, my question is what tactics BH SEOs are using, are they using something like simple hidden text or they have a lot more complicated tactics. My opinion is that BH is a lot more complicated then most webmasters think.

[rmccarley]

BH - A person that exploits weaknesses in the algo by breaking the webmaster guidelines. Typical examples are things that actually work like hidden text and/or links, sneaky redirects, scraping, spamming for links, and showing the SE spiders different content than what the viewer sees (forgot the tech term). The advantage to this is more traffic, sooner. The disadvantage is that when caught, the site will be banned sending no traffic. BH SEO is a numbers game: with enough websites and pages they recoup their costs and profit quickly to start new batches of sites again. BHs are known for automating their process to get the numbers up.

It is important to note that BH just breaks the webmaster guidelines and not the law. They don't hack sites. That is a whole different class of behavior.

There is nothing wrong with BH but it isn't advisable for sites looking to stick around. Though ironically, well established sites from big name companies can get away with a lot more BH stuff than normal sites.

It's all money.

[Wit]

...showing the SE spiders different content than what the viewer sees (forgot the tech term)...

"Cloaking". Most often: "IP delivery"

[Sorvoja]

There is no clear defenition of "black hat" SEO, but I would like to give it a try. To me "white hat" SEO is SEO without thinking about SEO. It is just doing the right thing for the user by following respected recommandations for accessability, usability, and copywriting. White Hat SEO is just what you get for doing things right in terms of webdesign, web development, content creation with no regards to how the end result would rank in the search engines. "White hat SEO" should be best since it should attract unsolisited links and by the fact that search engines would like to tweak their algorithms to rank "white hat" web sites higher, since they presumably are better for the user. Everything that is not "white hat" is "black hat".

[A.N.Onym]

Sorvjoya, while I like your definition of white hat SEO, I can't agree on the definition of the black hat one.

Does writing crappy titles, text w/o formatting or not linking correctly constitute to black hat SEO? No, that's just ignorance and ineffective site building.

Black hat SEO is when people:
- try to earn money without even trying to provide any value to the visitors
- cheat the SEs (violating their guidelines) - though this one isn't that clear (take nofollow, for example)

[Mark07]

Black hat SEO consists of the different methods which are applied in manipulating the search engines when they refer the resources of a webmaster which are used for the indexing of a website.

You‘ll get to know the various kinds of black hat techniques on the following link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hat_seo