White Hat Optimisation v Black Hat Optimisation

Introduction to some good-practise ways to optimise your website, and also some of the more shadier techniques employed by some optimisers. Whether you choose White Hat Optimisation or Black Hat Optimisation, you are balancing Risk v Rankings with the final say coming down to the search engines.

White Hat Optimisation (WHO)

White Hat Optimisation techniques are ways to optimise your website that are considered good practise by SEO experts to bring about better rankings in a search engine. There are thousands of websites, blogs and forums all over the Internet that will give you the definitive list of approved ways to optimise your website. I am not going to add my list here. For me, it comes down to 3 basic principles.

Original Content – Say something different with great Search Engine Optimised Content. Go that extra mile and give your visitors something to remember your site for. Don’t copy someone else’s content but make it your own and be passionate about it. I could get away with writing 300 words for this article for Google to like it, but I’ve enjoyed writing it so much, the word count has shot up to 680!
Incoming Links – Everyone is going on about how important incoming links are. You can join directories and lists and Blogs and Social Media networks until the day you die trying to get backlinks. Sure people need to know you’re out there and at some point I’ll submit a list of the few directories I join, but don’t lose sleep about it. If you’ve got the original content, they’ll find you.
Simple SEO – A web page that is Search Engine Optimised isn’t hard to create. Wordpress does most of the hard work for me! Just write good clean code, Search-Friendly Links and a few optimising tricks explained in my articles. Just concentrate on writing that content.

Black Hat Optimisation (BHO)

These optimisation techniques are basically used to get higher search engine rankings in an unethical manner. Much of Black Hat Optimisation was once legitimate, but with abuse and spamming, such techniques are now frowned upon by most SEO experts. The advantage of using BHO is generally to provide short-term gains in search rankings but this runs the risk of getting penalised or even dropped from search engines if found. Some of the more popular ones have been:

Font Size 1 – Using tiny, tiny text that is impossible to read. It is now considered spamming by search engines.
Invisible Text/Links – Text or links the same colour as the background so that they are read by search spiders but are invisible to website visitors, thus allowing keyword-stuffed pages.
Keyword Stuffing – Stuffing your sentences with keywords. Search Engines are very good at recognising the difference between content written for visitors and content written for search engines, and very good at penalising it too.
Duplicate Content – Search Engines are also very good at finding duplicate content on the Internet. I don’t know how it does it among the billions of web pages, but it does. Just write it once and forget about it.
Doorway Pages – These are basically fake pages that the visitor never sees and are only there for the search engines.
Mouseover Redirects – Place code and 1 pixel images on the page that redirect to other doorway/spammy pages.

So Who Wins?

That depends. It is not always black and white. Many optimising techniques fall somewhere in the middle. When you pay an Optimiser to get your website better ranked, how do you know whether their methods are frowned upon by Google. Do you care? Or, do you just care about getting that elusive number 1 position? If you have a legitimate business that is important to you. One that you want to succeed and grow year on year, then using Black Hat Optimisation you are doomed to failure. Any short terms gains are, well, short term. If you can sleep soundly at night when others are waking up in a cold sweat wondering if Google has found out their dirty tricks and is going to punish them to the dreaded Supplementary Index, then maybe it is for you. The choice is yours.