Search Engine Strategies - Black Hat

In the search engine marketing arena there are 2 schools of though. Like the force with its dark side and light side, you would tend to thing that Black Hat was bad, evil and crooked, while the White Hat is Good, acceptable and fair.

Black hat techniques are used everyday by webmasters looking for and exploiting weaknesses in the way search engines work. One controversial method that has a legitimate place in search engine strategy is "cloaking" also known as "IP delivery".

Legitimate use follows the reasoning that you are protecting your website html code from theft by those who would view the source of your high search engine placement pages and copy it or use it to determine what elements were causing it to have a top 10 search engine position.

Don't laugh, I started doing this in 1997 when things were much easier and using that method built better scoring web pages than the competition's page I analyzed. So what is Cloaking and what is black hat about it.

Black hat unethical use of cloaked pages works something like this…

A program runs on your web server with different versions of a web page, one optimized to search engine spec's and the other for the web surfer, visitor. This cloaked page can be keyword stuffed and even have misleading content to trick the search engine spider that this site is about something that it is not even remotely related to. Porn sites are known to use this trickery to get pages served up for terms outside that topic and then blam your hit with the nakedness of skin and impulse can get your credit card out really quick.

Ethical use is to protect your code and optimized pages from preying eyes and still serves a web visitor relevant content and a layout that is more viewer friendly than a page optimized for search engine spiders.

This is a very simplified example and not at all exhaustive. With the advent of Page Rank and Link Popularity there are a lot more off page elements that come into play now and what you see in the code does not always translate into a well ranking page. You have to analyze the off page factors as well.

OptiLink is the popular choice for this job and you should take a look and see what's involved.