White Hats, Black Hats, and Negative SEO

White Hats, Black Hats, and Negative SEO

Before we continue, and on the topic of snake oil salesmen, I'm going to make a quick note here for you about the two kinds of SEO that you might hear talked about on the web - "White Hat" and "Black Hat".

They're nicknamed this way because, in a Western, the good guy normally wears a white hat and the bad guy wears a black hat. It's the same with SEO; the "White Hat" guys are trying to be "good" and play by the rules, whilst the "Black Hat" guys are out there trying to break the rules.

By now, I hope by now I've already warned you off the sort of tools and tactics that are ultimately only going to damage your website but, as one final warning, don't be fooled by self-proclaimed “Black Hat” SEO providers. In recent years, offering "Black Hat" SEO has become something that some providers specialize in. They want you to believe that their "Black Hat" techniques are going to go undetected by Google and that they are selling you something better than a "normal" SEO provider. The truth is, it's extremely unlikely that any “Black Hat” tactic is going to have a long shelf life. Google are watching these guys constantly and in the rare occasions that they do achieve something spectacular, Google have been known to dish out penalties manually to websites that it believes are breaking the rules.

Remember, Google is a business and a closed system. Whilst they are under increasing scrutiny from government bodies, there is no law that they have to rank your site, and they don't have to include it in their index. Their business is predicated on giving their users the "right" answer - not the answer that you want them to give.

Sadly, “Black Hat” tactics can not only be used by people on their own websites - but on other people's. A burgeoning area of endeavour for “Black Hat” SEOs is "Negative SEO". Negative SEO uses known “Black Hat” tactics, which carry known penalties, on a target website to try and attract a penalty from Google.

For example, if you're getting roundly trounced on Google's front page by your competitor around the corner, you might be tempted to hire a "Black Hat" to go off and do some of the things that I'm advising against doing but, instead of doing them to your website, they do them to your competitor. They don't need to hack the competitor's site to do this (although you will find that service offered on some darker corners of the Internet as well) as most negative SEO tends to be "off-site" - e.g. it is concerned with activities such as creating lots of SPAM links to a website that Google will perceive as being spam and therefore (potentially) issue a penalty for.

Google claim that Negative SEO is impossible but there are a growing number of case studies that show examples of it. I’ve seen it myself and whilst you might be able to debate how much real impact it can have, there is no doubt that it is going on.