In movies with a Wild West setting, actors would wear either black or white hats to give a simple visual cue to the audience as to whether they were playing the good guy or the bad guy. White hats were worn by protagonists, while black hats were usually found on villains.
SEO refers to the practice of “search engine optimization“. Search engines, such as Google, have a very complex algorithm by which they sort the returned results of a given search. How it works exactly is a jealously guarded secret, but we can conclude by inference that it is positively correlated to the number of visits and links to that site.
Since people rarely go past the first page of search results, the intention behind black hat SEO is to artificially inflate the search ranking of a website by using various methods that may or may not make any sense, and thus give the website a higher search result position than it deserves.
As you can imagine, this does not sit well with Google’s engineers. There are reported cases of people who managed to figure out the algorithm and use SEO to “game the system”, causing their website to rise to the first position of Google’s search results undeservedly. When this practice eventually gets discovered, Google has all mention of them stricken from Google’s general search results, which is equivalent to an online death sentence.
To summarize the above, we see why black hat SEO is such a bad practice, and overall a wrong attitude to have. It presumes that there are vulnerabilities in the Google search algorithm; these vulnerabilities can be exploited. However, it’s not a problem if it’s done in a “white hat” manner, which is the correct way to have a website rise the top of the search results.
There is only one way of doing “SEO” and that is to have a website chock full of unique material that people from all over the world genuinely up-vote, like, share, enjoy and recommend to one another. Everything else is a practice doomed to succeed briefly—before failing miserably.
DDlisting 