Monday, June 19, 2006

Isulong SEOPH: The Grey Hat Technique

This is last “hat” technique we’ll be discussing. The Grey Hat
Technique. Why grey? Maybe because it’s inbetween white and black.
Inbetween acceptable and unacceptable practices. Inbetween ethical and
unethical practices.

The following tactics fall in the grey area between legitimate
tactics and search engine spam. 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.
Remember: even if the search engines cannot detect these tactics when
they are used as spam, your competitors will undoubtedly be on the
lookout and report your site to the engines in order to eliminate you
from the competition.


It is definitely worth noting that, while it may be tempting to
enlist grey-hat and black-hat search engine positioning tactics in
order to rank well, doing so stands a very good chance of getting your
website penalized. There are legitimate methods for ranking a website
well on the search engines. It is highlyrecommended that webmasters and
SEO’s put in the extra time and effortto properly rank a website well,
insuring that the site will not be penalized down the road or even
banned from the search engines entirely.

Grey-Hat Search Engine Positioning Tactics:


Cloaking


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. Even so, this tactic is 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.


Arguably, 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 andimage(s) on it, this could be considered a legitimate use
of cloaking.

As cloaking has often been abused, if other methods such as
adding visible text to the page is possible it is recommended. If there
are no other alternatives it is recommended that you contact the search
engine prior to adding this tactic and explain your argument.


Paid Links


The practice of purchasing link on websites solely for the increase
in link-popularity that it can mean has grown steadily over the last
year-or-so with link auction sites such as LinkAdage making this
practice
easier. When links are purchased as pure advertising the practice is
considered legitimate, while the practice of purchasing links only for
the increase in link-popularity is considered an abuse and efforts will
be made to either discount the links or penalize the site (usually the
sellers though not always).


As a general rule, if you arepurchasing links you should do so for
the traffic that they will yield and consider any increase in
link-popularity to be an “added bonus”.

Duplicate Content


Due primarily to the increase in popularity of affiliate programs,
duplicate content on the web has become an increasingly significant
problem for both search engines and 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.

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.


If you find competitors using these tactics it is not unethical to report them on the search engine. 
You are helping yourself, the search engines, and the visitors by
insuring that only legitimate companies, providing real information and
content, appear at the top of the search engines.

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