I found Professor Sweet’s discussion of “black-hat SEO” pretty interesting, so I decided to do a bit more digging.
The term originates from western movies, where good guys would wear white hats and the bad hombres would wear black hats.
Interestingly, there are actually a lot of parallels – in western movies, the black hat guys are trying to cheat the system. They steal cattle, force competitors off of good land, reporting competitors to law enforcement for minor offenses, etc. In SEO, the black hat SEO, many of the same tactics apply. Black hat SEO includes things like paying for links, keyword stuffing, and reporting competing pages when they are legit.
Though in the “wild west” days of the internet so-called “Black Hat SEO” could bring success (much the same as it could in the real wild west), those days are over. Try stealing cattle now. It probably wouldn’t go over very well – you’d get reported to law enforcement and that law enforcement would not be colluding with the black hat fellows. Same thing with the web. Google’s algorithms have improved to better detect black hat SEO and punish (sometimes even delisting) pages that practice it. And Google also has ways for the good guys to report the bad guys.
So… think of black hat SEO like rustling cattle in the wild west. It was never ethical, and now… it’ll probably hurt your cause more than help it.
One Response
This was such an interesting way to explain Black Hat SEO. This is the perfect narrative/story format needed to help explain this crucial part of SEO to beginners. I really like how you compared Google to law enforcement and how those who partake in Black Hat SEO might get short-term benefit from it but eventually will be sought out by Google and punished. I really like how you talked about the origin of the phrase “Black Hat SEO” and how that relates. Good job!