Grey-Hat SEO Tactics

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics

The SEO tactics that fall in the grey area between legitimate tactics and search engine spam are considered to be "grey-hat" SEO Tactics. They include tactics such as cloaking, paid links, duplicate content and a number of others. Unless you are on the correct side of this equation these tactics are not recommended.

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics:

• Cloaking
  White Side - There are times when cloaking is considered a legitimate tactic by users and search engines alike. Basically, if there is a logical reason why you should be allowed to present different information to the search engines than the visitor (if you have content behind a "members only" area for example) you are relatively safe. Another example of a site legitimately using cloaking, is when the site is mainly image-based such as an art site. In this event, provided that the text used to represent the page accurately defines the page and image(s) on it, this could be considered a legitimate use of cloaking.
  
  Black Side - This tactic is considered to be very risky and it is recommended that you contact each search engine, present your reasoning, and allow them the opportunity to approve it's use.
• Duplicate Content
  Black Side - Duplicate content on the web has increasingly became a significant problem for both search engines as well as search engine users alike with the same or similar sitesdominating the top positions in the search engine results pages.
  
  To address this problem many search engines have added filters that seek out pages with the same or very similar content and eliminate the duplicate. Even at times when the duplicate content is not detected by the search engines it is often reported by competitors and the site's rankings penalized.
  
  White Side - There are times when duplicate content is considered legitimate by both search engines and visitors and that is on resource sites. A site that consists primarily as an index of articles on a specific subject-matter will not be penalized by posting articles that occur elsewhere on the net, though the weight it may be given as additional content will likely not be as high as a page of unique content.

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White-Hat SEO Tactics

White-Hat SEO Tactics

Any SEO tactic that maintains the integrity of your website and the SERPs (search engine results pages) is considered a "white-hat" search engine optimization tactic. These are the only tactics that we will use whenever applicable and which enhance rather than detract from your website and from the rankings.

White-Hat SEO Tactics:

• Internal Linking
• Reciprocal Linking
• Content Creation
• Writing For Others
• Site Optimization

• Internal Linking
  By far one of the easiest ways to stop your website from ranking well on the search engines is to make it difficult for search engines to find their way through it. Many sites use some form of script to enable fancy drop-down navigation, etc. Many of these scripts cannot be crawled by the search engines resulting in unindexed pages.
  
  While many of these effects add visual appeal to a website, if you are using scripts or some other form of navigation that will hinder the spidering of your website it is important to add text links to the bottom of at least your homepage linking to all you main internal pages including a sitemap to your internal pages.
• Reciprocal Linking
  Exchanging links with other webmasters is a good way (not the best, but good) of attaining additional incoming links to your site. While the value of reciprocal links has declined a bit over the past year they certainly still do have their place.
  
  A VERY important note is that if you do plan on building reciprocal links it is important to make sure that you do so intelligently. Random reciprocal link building in which you exchange links with any and virtually all sites that you can will not help you over the long run. Link only to sites that are related to yours and who's content your visitors will be interested in and preferably which contain the keywords that you want to target. Building relevancy through association is never a bad thing unless you're linking to bad neighborhoods (penalized industries and/or websites).
  
  If you are planning or currently do undertake reciprocal link building you know how time consuming this process can be. An useful tool that can speed up the process is PRProwler. Essentially this tool allows you to find related sites with high PageRank, weeding out many of the sites that would simply be a waste of time to even visit. You can read more about PRProwler on our search engine positioning tools page.
• Content Creation
  Don't confuse "content creation" with doorway pages and the such. When we recommend content creation we are discussing creating quality, unique content that will be of interest to your visitors and which will add value to your site.
  
  The more content-rich your site is the more valuable it will appear to the search engines, your human visitors, and to other webmasters who will be far more likely to link to your website if they find you to be a solid resource on their subject.
  
  Creating good content can be very time-consuming, however it will be well worth the effort in the long run. As an additional bonus, these new pages can be used to target additional keywords related to the topic of the page.
• Writing For Others
  You know more about your business that those around you so why not let everyone know? Whether it be in the form of articles, forum posts, or a spotlight piece on someone else's website, creating content that other people will want to read and post on their sites is one of the best ways to build links to your website that don't require a reciprocal link back.
• Site Optimization
  The manipulation of your content, wording, and site structure for the purpose of attaining high search engine positioning is the backbone of SEO and the search engine positioning industry. Everything from creating solid title and meta tags to tweaking the content to maximize it's search engine effectiveness is key to any successful optimization effort.

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Black-Hat SEO Tactics

Black Hat SEO mainly focuses on spamming. Or Black hat tactics is much spammy method.

The "black-hat" tactics are not intended to help you "trick" the search engines but rather to warn you against these tactics. You will find information on SEO tactics that have been or at the very least should and certainly will be banned by the major search engines. These are tactics that are subject to large scale abuse.

WARNING: do NOT use these tactics. They will get your website penalized and/or banned, if not today then soon.

• Keyword Stuffing
  This is probably one of the most commonly abused forms of search engine spam. Essentially this is when a webmaster or SEO places a large number of instances of the targeted keyword phrase in hopes that the search engine will read this as relevant. In order to offset the fact that this text generally reads horribly it will often be placed at the bottom of a page and in a very small font size. An additional tactic that is often associated with this practice is hidden text which is commented on below.
• Doorway Pages
  Doorway pages are pages added to a website solely to target a specific keyword phrase or phrases and provide little in the way of value to a visitor. Generally the content on these pages provide no information and the page is only there to promote a phrase in hopes that once a visitor lands there, that they will go to the homepage and continue on from there. Often to save time these pages are generated by software and added to a site automatically. This is a very dangerous practice. Not only are many of the methods of injecting doorway pages banned by the search engines but a quick report to the search engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine content pages.
• Duplicate Content Operation
  If the targeted pages’ content where to be duped on some throwaway “bad neighborhood” domains, possibly embedded in spammy keywords (e.g. porn, pills, casinos), invisible text, etc., this may result in both sets of pages being deindexed.
• Over-Submission Operation
  While the effect of this approach is generally deemed questionable, attackers have been know to over-submit pages (typically within a fully automated setup) to the search engines either from a single IP or even spread across a set of seemingly unrelated IPs.
• Redirection Operation
  If hackers where to implement 301 redirects to the targeted pages/domains from some “bad neighborhood” (e.g. porn sites, link farms, etc.) this could result in the attacked pages being deindexed.
• Interlinking
  This tactic is more difficult to detect than others when done "correctly" . This tactic is difficult to detect from a user standpoint unless you end up with multiple sites in the top positions on the search engines in which case it is likely that you will be reported.As incoming links became more important for search engine positioning the practice of building multiple websites and linking them together to build the overall link popularity of them all became a common practice.

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Blog Pinging

If you want to ensure your latest posts appear in Google’s Blog Search you will want to ping them everytime you make a new post.

• Manual Ping
• Automatic Ping

Manual Ping
The manual method of pinging Google is to simply go to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping and enter your blogs URL everytime your blog is updated. This is the straight forward method but many will prefer the Automatic Ping method listed below.

Automatic Ping
If you want WordPress to automatically ping Google everytime you update your blog, then you will need to add http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 to your Update Services box in your WordPress admin area. This is found in the options/writing section of the admin area and by default Pingomatic (http://rpc.pingomatic.com) will already be in the text box.
While Pingomatic already pings a number of services for you, by adding Google’s ping url to the Update Services list you are sure to increase your blogs exposure on the net. For more information on ping lists and a comprehensive list of update services see the WordPress Compressed All Inclusive Ping List.

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