Yesterday, I ran into a post over at The NetFool than ran down a few Black Hat SEO Techniques. Black Hat techniques always get me thinking. Using the term "Black Hat", automatically assumes the existence of White, Gray and theoretically "No Hat" techniques.

No Hat SEO

Techniques listed under this category are about the only ones that won’t have someone calling you a spammer, black hat, or anything of the sort. It is involves using an "if you build it, they will come" technique. Sending one email to your sister about your new site would automatically eject you from this group. Play around a little and you can make specific posts come up first in your site’s own search engine. Give yourself a damn cookie.

The Upside: You are the nicest, unspammiest person on the internet. Congrats, you succeeded in pissing off no one.
The Downside: You are your only visitor to your site. But if you use proxy, you can trick yourself. But that would be black hat.

White Hat SEO

Techniques under this category involve a lot of manual typing in forms and changing the structure and content of your site. You may type the same information into each form, but as long as you are using your fingers instead of software, you are alright with most people. If you start ranking higher for another company for their product’s name, you will be called a black hat. If you can type real fast, Google will assume you are a black hat and put you in the sandbox for being aggressive.

The Upside: You are a god to the no hat’s. It’s like being the only kid on the block with a moped. Don’t fool yourself.
The Downside: You are instantly suspicious to anyone who is not an SEO.

Gray Hat SEO

Now we’re talking. Now this is where you start getting traffic and making money. And this is the best place to be. After all, black is the absence of all light. One step toward white makes you gray. There are a lot of techniques milling around in here.

The Upside: You are way past the damn labels. You don’t care about being "god" any more. In fact, with the results going into your pocket book, you would rather turn the volume down on your accomplishments a bit.
The Downside: You don’t get to scare pimpled teenagers in forums with your ominous dark fedora.

Black Hat SEO

Continuing with the definition that black is the absence of all light, you have succeeded in setting everyone’s homepage to your website, all search engine queries redirect to a page on your site, and you can retire in exactly 5 minutes.

The Upside: You are now the most sought after person on the net because you made it that way.
The Downside: Your site just crashed and everyone is getting a little spinning icon, so you can forget the retiring part.

Ass Hat SEO

You hang out at conferences. You know all the techniques. You use them to trounce newbies in forums. But you are little more than a no hat. Results. You don’t need no stinking results.

The Upside: If you can trick yourself into believing your own facade, you can boost your ego a bit.
The Downside: Look at the name, for god sakes. Your the only one who doesn’t know you’ve been labeled.

What is simply comes down to is this: if your site ranks for anything, you or your readers have used SEO with or without knowing it. Stop your bitching. Stop your labels. Just get off your ass and do what everyone else has done to build a well trafficked site. Work, move forward, do what needs to be done and let the whining babies whine. They will always find something new to cry about.

I have done a few things in the past to make sites rank that would definitely qualify as being on the black hat side of things. I am done with that now. It’s too much work just to see all my work washed away by a search engine update. And I am not the type to keep trying to beat the search engines just for the sake of saying you can. But, of course that’s not the only reason to resort to spam and trickery. It is also very lucrative, if you can get a handle on it.

It’s a battle of the minds. Just because Google only hires PHD’s doesn’t mean that they can catch all black hat tactics. Some people just think outside of the box and having a PHD doesn’t automatically put you in that league of people. In fact some of the black hat’s I’ve run into didn’t even graduate high school yet. But the game itself has almost as much draw as the money does. And if played right, you can keep one step ahead of Google and three steps ahead of the other guys.

Google says that they will let changes in their algorithm clean up the spam. But when do they change their algorithm. When the spam first starts showing? Nope, they develop for the lowest common denominator. Any company with a reach like Google has to. They are out the phase of drastic, creative changes. Only Apple and a few others have the balls to make big changes, although I can point out how even Apple hedges their bets.  It’s called inertia. And a body as big as Google will stay at rest for a long time once it reaches that state.

If they change an algorithm for their search engines too dramatically, it will be seen across the whole range of search engine results. And the same factors in their algorithms that make it possible to exploit loopholes may make it possible for millions of people to find what they are looking for. Despite what Google says about the complexity of their algorithm, a minor change in it will cause a dramatic change in the ranking of the billions of pages it indexes. The algorithm’s complexity does not compare to the complexity of the internet itself.

Think of it this way. The algorithm is the base of everything that Google does, like the foundation of the skyscraper. You aren’t just going to run in and change it on whims or you’re going to see a skyscraper flat on the ground.

But once a tactic gets around and more and more spam and cloaked sites show up in the search engine results, something has to be done. If they had changed it before, it would have a very dramatic change. And people jump from search engine to search engine for very minor reasons. I am not talking about people like you and me who do business online. I am talking about your mother who looks for crossword puzzles and buys Christmas presents online, the consumers. But now when the spam becomes a bigger issue for users jumping ship than the algorithm change does, time to change. Yet, the change is still gradual.

Will there ever be an end to black hat? Let’s ask some questions along the same lines first. Will their ever be counterfeit proof money or ID’s? The new RFID was hacked in minutes before it was even released. So I highly doubt that black hat tactics will ever end. Not until the ranking algorithms are just as complex as the internet itself, and that is going to take some time. So for now and for years from now, it is still a game where the streamlined mind of one person or a small team can run faster than the borg mind of Google. But for me, black hat is just too much work to end up with an empire built on instability.