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Is black hat SEO advanced enough to be called advanced SEO?

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 9, 2008 in Advanced SEO

Todd Friesen passed on a light-hearted comment to me this morning from someone who thought I might enjoy participating in the controversial discussion Lisa Barone started on the Bruce Clay blog with her review of SMX Advanced 2008. I think I’ll pass on directly adding my two cents but the points that Lisa, Danny Sullivan, Vanessa Fox, and a few others make about what is and isn’t black hat, cutting edge SEO, etc. got me to wondering.

Do people really think that sneaky redirects and buying links are advanced search engine optimization? What utter crap and nonsense!

People who rely on links for their search engine optimization had better be doing it only because they cannot change the content they are trying to rank. Linking is the worst possible way to optimize for search because it’s inefficient and the return on investment sucks. Trust me on that because I personally manage many thousands of (unpaid) links for clients (not to mention tens of thousands of links for myself). My team take care many thousands of links, too.

We certainly do have campaigns where we have to influence search results through links and it is a total time-consuming pain in the rear. I say that as someone who can probably build more links in a month than most of you are able to beg, borrow, buy, or steal — combined. To do it right you need content, not just links. Links don’t exist without content. Some day all the link lovers will realize they’ve been preaching crap and nonsense for years and come to understand that it’s the content that shapes the link, not the link that drives the content.

I get the whole concept behind buying links. People buy links because they don’t have the time, resources, knowledge, whatever to create effective linking profiles. Buying links may be a quick road to success. In my opinion, it could also be a quick road to failure. Whenever a client asks me about buying links, I make sure we have the “do you understand and accept the risks” discussion.

Getting a client to understand what they may lose if they focus on buying links is more advanced than buying links, but if I were to buy links I’d put some very stringent tests to work to ensure I got the best possible value for my buck. Toolbar PR is an absolute waste of time when it comes to evaluating the quality of a linking resource.

I agree that site design is the foundation of successful search engine optimization. I disagree with anyone who feels that rel=’nofollow’ is helpful or useful in optimized site design, except for pages where your users can place outbound links. Let them earn the privilege of placing trusted links. Since search engines may penalize you for linking out to bad sites, I’ll live with nofollow on pages I cannot control.

I’ve sometimes thought it would be cool to design a site that shows only nofollowed links to people and follow links to search engines. Call that “link cloaking”, which hasn’t been specifically forbidden by any search engine I’m aware of. It would help disguise your nofollow strategy and confuse competitors. Let them call you a moron while they shoot themselves in the foot by actually nofollowing their own content. He who laughs last laughs best. But that’s just a fleeting thought for a joke. I wouldn’t advise anyone to do that.

There are things that some black hats do which I consider to be cutting edge SEO techniques. Ralph Tegtmeier’s “20 links a day” program, for example, is not in my opinion black hat SEO. But it IS cutting edge search engine optimization for several reasons. And the links pass value, according to my tests. You don’t actually buy links with Ralph’s program. That’s the cool thing. Near as I can determine, 20 Links A Day has the potential to launch an entirely new industry that gets you out of the entire “is it ethical SEO?” dilemma.

Which is not to say that some competitor can’t come along and adapt Ralph’s model to an entirely spammy use. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone is trying to work out such a model right now. Nonetheless, he has taken a step to help move search engine optimization forward past the paid links bottleneck. That’s what advanced search engine optimization is really all about: innovation, experimentation, pushing the frontier further back. Today’s cutting edge link service may be tomorrow’s standard best practice.

Page redirection is old-school SEO. When you have to show the search engines indexable content that matches unindexable content, the search engines don’t object. They understand the problem. That’s not black hat. Nor should it be considered advanced SEO. At one time it was advanced SEO but we’ve moved on and become more sophisticated. You can buy IP redirection software rather than have to engineer it from scratch.

If it’s sneaky and deceptive, it’s black hat. But being sneaky and deceptive is not cutting the edge of search engine optimization theory. Finding new ways to be sneaky and deceptive is not, in my opinion, cost-effective for B2B SEO service. If you’re trying to make money off of spammy advertising-laden content, sneaky and deceptive may look attractive to you but your business model incorporates predictable losses. Why not eliminate the losses? Hey, that’s just me.

Advanced search engine optimization can show its strengths in several areas:

1. Content optimization theory
2. Site design theory
3. Site architecture theory
4. Trends analysis theory
5. Query building theory
6. SEO metrics theory
7. Link theory

That is, to be truly advanced, advanced SEO needs to lay the foundation in theory and bridge the gap to applied principles. You’re not buying links in advanced SEO. You’re not cloaking in advanced SEO (but your advanced SEO may find new ways to optimize the cloaking process). You’re not letting Google Analytics do your analysis for you in advanced SEO.

Advanced SEO builds new tools, new techniques, and establishes new principles. Advanced SEO breaks the mold and tries something new, something different. There is always some immeasurable risk in this approach but that is why advanced SEOs don’t panic. They understand the potential risks and have backup plans. They can do quick rollbacks if necessary.

I see nothing dazzling in the black hat tips that are being shared these days. People are just trying to increase the volume of their spam, the lifespan of their spam, the perceived quality of their spam. So what? Big deal.

The real challenge is in improving the search results, improving the content, in shortening the length of time it takes to get from nowhere to the top of as many queries as possible and in lengthening the period in which you maintain that high profile visibility.

The easiest path to that kind of success is to create another CNN. But since most of us don’t have that option, we’ll have to continue exploring the as-yet mostly unrealized potential of search engine optimization. Black hat SEOs will from time to time contribute to our growing pool of knowledge but most of them appear to be stuck at the level of script-kiddies. The majority of innovation will come from all corners, in my opinion.

In this business it’s not how white your hat is that matters, it’s how fat your bottom has become from doing nothing new.