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White Hats Get Wiped By Google Rule Changes

August 1st, 2005

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So you’ve been a good little white hat. Working hard over the last several years building your site. Then you woke up this morning and realized that Google Changed the Rules. Your site has been banned without any warning. From threadwatch I went to this Webmaster world topic and read about a hundred comments like this:

andrea99:

Well I am totally off the index… I had ONE google referral about an hour ago, but it must have been some kind of a fluke. Compared with yesterday when I had several thousand by this time of day. I feel like the last four years of my life have just drained away.

JKMitchell:

My main site contains about 180 pages of content and then has a directory. As of some point this morning the complete site has vanished from Google ( even the site:www.domain.com command shows no pages).
Yesterday I was a PR6 today nothing. Needless to say the traffic has slowed to a trickle – so much for the past 8 years

alwaysthinking:

Now after all their years of growth and most always featuring my “stuff” near the tops of appropriate search results, they completely delete my information from their data base.

As Ian Cunningham pointed out, many of the sites in this DMOZ list don’t have any page rank any more – they’ve been completely delisted.

I can only imagine how crushed those folks on the Webmaster World thread felt after trying to play “by the rules” for all these years. For me, I have several irons in the fire: adult sites, Full on Black Hat Search Engine Spam Sites, completely legit sites and consulting services. If the rules change, I’m prepared: In fact I love rules changes. For me, it just makes the game more interesting and creates more opportunities to find profitable exploits.

As I posted earlier, there will be a convergence where the search engine game will evolve to where the SEO Black Hats will be forced to deliver EXACTLY what the end user wants.

Until that time, the difference between White Hat and Black Hat will be the difference between hoping that things go well and money in the bank.

In the end, how can you argue with money in the bank?

The SEO Black Hat Illusionist: Making the Dark Seem Light.

July 31st, 2005

QuadsZilla

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Most people are not hard core SEO black hats. On the other hand, no SEO worth his salt has never had a site banned. If you’re not a full-on SEO Black Hat Search Engine Spammer, but just wanted to remain competitive, you have probably engaged in some less than white hat tactics: Buying a few links, a little Keyword stuffing here, maybe some manual comment spam there.

If you want to run a legit site, like SEOBlackhat.com, you can’t use blatant black hat tactics without getting banned. On the other hand, if you do no use at least some shady Search Engine Optimization tactics, it’s gonna take you a long time to get noticed.

So the SEO question becomes, for legit sites, how dark can I go? Well, take this picture for example:

Obviously, you want your legit site to be more like “Square B” than “Square A”.

A site that is “Square A’s” shade of gray will probably get banned, while a site that is “Square B’s” shade of gray will probably excel.

But hold on a minute! Square A and Square B are both EXACTLY THE SAME COLOR. They are both hex #6B6B6B. if you don’t believe me, download it and see for yourself.

The lessons here are:

Perception is reality. If you are GOOD at Blackhat Search Engine Optimization then the Search Engines will perceive your sites to be exactly what they are looking for.

The standards by which your are judged are relative to your surroundings: Just as your color perception is affected by surrounding colors – Practices that could seem benign become more high-risk when you are in a bad neighborhood.

You want to be as shady as possible when it comes to your SEO tactics, while seeming as light and innocent as possible. It’s all a question of how to manipulate and game search engine’s perception.

The above illusion was taken from this site.