You can't leave your black hat on

Good morning everybody

Today’s topic will be a little bit different from the usual ones, but still related to marketing ethics.

The title of the post may seem you strange, despite the fact that it echoes the famous Joe Cocker’s song: the subject I am going to deal with is black hat SEO.

First of all, what is SEO? As a marketer, it is impossible not to know it, since it is a really hot topic nowadays. SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization: Wikipedia defines it as «the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results».

SEO

More easily, we make use of some search engines everyday: the most famous one is Google, but there are others, like Bing and Yahoo. 

As a company – but even as a single individual, if we want to promote ourselves – it is crucial to appear among the first results in order to get more visitors: the goal of web marketers adopting SEO techniques is to get a higher rank in the search results page and to appear more frequently in the search results list. 

“The best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google”, they say: we can easily understand that being on the first page is very important for companies. 

Improving your ranking through SEO techniques

To have a quick and nice explanation, you can watch What Is SEO.

There are various licit SEO techniques: choosing the best keywords – with the aid of tools such as Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, having web analytics in place, creating high-quality contents, using relevant titles and meta-descriptions and so on. 

On the other hand, there are also web marketers who use aggressive SEO strategies, not aimed at attracting the audience, but just search engines, and in a deceptive way. These methods are called black hat from western movies: indeed, bad characters usually wear black hats, while good guys carry white ones.  

Black hat as a symbol of evilness

Black hat SEO techniques exploit the logic of the algorithms upon which search engines are based, trying to cheat them. Common methods are:

• Keyword stuffing, the strategic use of a certain keyword to make the webpage appear pertinent to the content users are searching for (even if probably it is not so).
• Doorway pages, pages without contents, but created to redirect users to other pages.
• Cloaking, the creation of two different web pages, one for the users and one for search engines’ spiders. That is done because the content of the “real” page, the one created for users, is substantially different – sometimes pornographic.
• Link spam, the use of link farms – groups of web sites that all hyperlink to the other members’ website – to gain visibility.
• Hidden text, the creation of invisible contents – in the same colour of the page background, for instance. 

Black hat SEO techniques

We are talking about these techniques because they are an example of unethical web marketing: these people cheat search engines and users at the same time, they are unethical under a stakeholder-oriented approach. 

If I am searching for something on Google, for instance, I am expecting that the first results are the web sites providing the best contents about that topic. With black hat SEO techniques, I can be deceived, since the web sites that make use of them appear among the first results, but they are not qualitative at all. 

Usually, who uses these techniques is someone who aims at a quick financial return through its website, and it is not concerned with a long term perspective; that is why usually Google rates better pages that have been existing for more than one year.

Luckily, search engines usually ban these people, but, before, they have to recognize them as spammers: it may take time, usually sufficient for them to achieve their goals. 

However, these behaviours are not rewarded: it is far better to obtain a long-term competitive advantage through high quality contents, than cheating search engines with deceptive SEO practices. 

That is why, in order to be successful and ethical at the same time, you can't leave your black hat on.

Carlotta Neuenschwander