Sphinn - Black Hat vs. White Hat From SES

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Black Hat vs. White Hat From SES

Posted By: hotdogtherapper 94 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.seomfg.com)
Category: SEO

The best session at SES this year was the black/white hat panel. There were arguments, there was Matt Cutts, there was Vanessa Fox. It was fun. Here is a breakdown of the whol experience through the eyes of a couple of SEOs who attended.

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from NickWilsdon 93 days ago #

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What is Blackhat? Best definition ever from Todd Friesen :D

"If Matt Cutts were to walk up behind you while you were working on a client’s SEO, would you immediately shut your laptop closed? If so, I think you have your answer."

from DarkMatter 93 days ago #

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interesting to read the rationalizations for BH...

if every SEO was an expert blackhat who used tricks and automation to get their sites to rank at any cost, search engines would no longer return useful results. Effectively, BH would break search. I don't use search engines that don't return useful results, and neither do most consumers. The end result is having destroyed one of the most interesting and useful tools ever created, and your own livelihood along with it.

personally, I don't crap where I eat.

from NickWilsdon 93 days ago #

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@DarkMatter

Absolutely, I'm seeing the same game played out here in Russia at the moment. Some of the local engines are relatively easy to game - which is ultimately ruining the quality of the SERPs there and turning more people to Google.

from Jill 92 days ago #

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"If Matt Cutts were to walk up behind you while you were working on a client’s SEO, would you immediately shut your laptop closed? If so, I think you have your answer."

Could have sworn it was Bruce who said that.

from sza 92 days ago #

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If Matt Cutts were to walk up behind you...

Poor analogy. Are your interests and Google's interests perfectly aligned?

No.

So even if you do SEO in good faith, you may not want a Google employee looking over your shoulder, whether you do black, gray or white hat.

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If Google is all about “user satisfaction”

For transactional queries, Google simply cannot be about real user satisfaction, try as they might.

Their basic model only works for informational queries, where practically everything is there to be found on the page itself.

For business-related queries, user satisfaction depends more on product quality, client service, shipping etc, than incoming links or even site architecture. Can Google measure any of these? They can't, so they produce rankings based on fake signals.

The thing with Google's ranking method is that it does not work for business-related queries, but, luckily for them, it does not even have to.

Why? Because relevance flaws are only obvious for informational queries, not so for business-related searches.

Will users care if the most authorative (eg. governmental) informational resource is missing from the top ten? They will.

Will users care if the company with the best client service is missing from the top hundred? They will never even realize it.

So Google has an enormous leverage over sites when it comes to transactional search types.

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[Visually, the post's alternating black and white backgrounds are horrible and a strain on the eye]

from JohnHGohde 91 days ago # - show/hide this comment

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This Sphinn is a lot more revealing on this topic than the other one was.

"As SEOs, we have two choices: rank fast (30 days) or rank properly according to Google, which could take up to 3 years - sometimes more."

One problem, that I do have with Google is that it takes way too long for them to crawl static websites. Google responds immediately to pings from blogs, yet can take months to crawl white hat SEOed static websites. Seems absurd to me.