Google defines Black Hat SEO as manipulation of links for a site to rank higher in Google’s search engine ranking pages. This much is clear from Google’s quality guidelines. It frowns upon and will penalize any action that seeks to artificially manipulate links for a website to rank higher. This is going to be a problem. Why? This is the essence of link building.
For the longest time, search engine optimization has been defined as, for the most part, link building. If you want to rank higher for a certain keyword, you need to build links for that keyword. The problem is if you are just going to go by Google’s best practices guidelines and quality guidelines by logical extension, any link building is Black Hat. Black Hat, of course, are any activities that push the envelope. These are activities that can get you penalized by Google. White Hat, on the other hand, are practices that are pure in terms of Google’s quality guidelines. These practices all involve actions that comply with Google’s quality standards. So does this necessarily mean that there is a distinction? Actually, no.
If White Hat SEOs work to rank a website higher, they are by definition violating Google’s quality guidelines. In fact, it can be argued that since White Hats focus on building links they are by definition Black Hat. Not so fast.
Google’s Ideal Link Earning Process
The whole problem of White Hat and Black Hat distinction really is due to the fact that Google is living in a fantasy land in regards to how links are created. In Google’s ideal vision, all search engine optimization specialists need to do is to produce the best content in the world for their niche. Once they share the word about that page on Tweeter, Facebook or Google Plus, the world will slowly realize that such a page is the best page for that niche. Eventually, bloggers and website owners will link to that page because of its high quality.
In Google’s view, this is the natural way to build links. The high quality of your content will, through the force of nature and just human psychology, pull natural links from people. You are not creating these links. You are not paying these people to write these links. You are not doing anything to draw these links. In Google’s view, this is the definition of natural linking. The problem with this is obvious. Google is living in a fantasy land. Businesses need to make money today. Businesses need to drive traffic today. Traffic is the lifeblood of the internet. If you do not know how to drive traffic, you are not going to make money online. It is that simple.
Unfortunately, if everybody who builds a website is to follow Google’s ideal vision of “natural links”, they will be waiting forever. In fact, it can take quite a bit of money and resources to generate links the way Google wants people to generate links. This is all laughable and this is ridiculous. It would be quite a funny joke if this vision had no direct impact on people’s lives. Unfortunately, Google bases its quality guidelines, and by extension, its penalties on this piped dream. Google’s whole “natural link” and link enforcement policies are base on a piped dream. This is a problem, and this is precisely why there is this false diconomy between White Hat and Black Hat. In reality there is really one color hat if you are building links. We are all Black Hats. Ideally, Google wants websites to draw links, the problem with this is that you need to take some action to draw links. It does not happen as quickly and as naturally as Google would like to imagine.
Difference in Degree Matter
The reality is that all SEOs build links. Seriously. They take action in such a way that links are created. Of course, the big difference is not so much of the kind, since they are all taking actions and by logical extension violating Google’s quality standards and guidelines, but the degree of actions they take. This is where Black Hat and White Hat distinctions start to make sense. They do not make sense from the absolute perspective of Google but from a practical perspective in terms of the degrees of actions taken to generate links Black Hats and White Hats stand apart.
To determine whether you are a Black Hat or a White Hat, you have to focus on the actions that you use to draw or earn links. It really all boils down to that. Some practices apparently, according to Google, are more White Hat than Black Hat. Which actions are these? It can be social media outreach. It could be a press release. It could even be an e-mail, a targeted e-mail campaign. It might even be as simple as picking up the phone. However, looking at these actions from a purist perspective and a tight reading of Google’s terms and guidelines, all these are efforts on your part that lead to the benefit of your client or your website. Arguably, these are Black Hat. So the key here is where do you draw the line.
I would like to submit that the distinction between White Hat and Black Hat is not so much taking action but how close that action is into actually building links. It is one thing to set in motion a chain of actions that result in your website drawing or earning links from the independent actions of third parties, it is another matter entirely for you to actually build the links yourself. Granted, there is a lot of gray area here, it can be very confusing.
What is Clear: Direct Link Building is on the Way Out
The good news is if you are directly involved in building links, like filling up a form and out pops a back link, those days are over, you are definitely in Black Hat territory. Based on Google’s pronouncements over the past four years, this is closer to link building and direct link creation than link earning. Whenever you fall on this side of the fence you are in Black Hat territory. What are the examples of these types of link building? We are of course talking about paid links, web2.0, profile links, building your own link wheel or link network, creating your own link system, joining paid guest post exchanges and farming dropped domains for page rank and other practices. What do all these practices have in common? They are all deliberate. They all involve actions that produce quick back links. With that said, you might think that the rest of the available link creation activities are black and white. You would be absolutely wrong. There is still a lot of gray areas in SEO.
Remaining Gray Areas
As I have pointed out earlier, the whole issue regarding the penalization of MyBlogGuest and Postjoint was due to the fact that these guest post exchange platforms took money. In a very real sense Google viewed these platforms as paid link networks. With that said, the obvious gray area is that you may be able to use unpaid guest post exchanges and not be penalized. There are other more informal gray areas out there, the most common is when digital media agencies and individual search engine optimization practitioners participate in schemes where they scratch each others’ backs.
In other words, they do each other favors in boosting each others’ back link profiles. This is obviously coordinated, this is obviously deliberate, and you can bet it is manipulative. It is not a gray area precisely because it is hard to detect, but given the rate in which Google is getting smarter it probably will not take long for these back link building schemes to be detected. Similarly, social media outreach to a wide range of people whom you know will help you with a back link in exchange for your linking back to them either through your own property or through a third party. The reality is that these gray area mechanisms may work now but that is no guarantee regarding the long term.
It is Always Google’s Call
As we can already learn from Google’s crack down on paid links, article links and guest post links, Google can narrow its definition of what is acceptable. This is the problem with playing in the gray area. Things that may work now may not work one year from now or five years from now. That is the risk that you are taking. The worst part of all of this is fact that there is no grandfather clause for Google. Stuff that is acceptable now may all of a sudden be unacceptable at a future date, and guess what, you are penalized and there is nothing you can do about it. Basically, you pay for the sins that you committed way in the past. That is justice Google style.
What is the Way Out?
The most obvious way out of the whole Black Hat-White Hat false dichotomy is to focus on quality. While many search engine optimization practitioners would get into this philosophical sophistry about what is quality, we can all cut out the b.s.. We all know what quality is. At the very least you have to put yourself in the shoes of the end user. Would you be interested and happy about the content that you are publishing in the internet? If you are not, then what makes you think that other people would like the crap that you dish out?
This is why, as impossible as it may seem, your focus should be to get as close to Google’s piped dream as possible. Try to earn links and draw them instead of building them. This will take a lot of outreach, a lot of research, but the good news is that there are a lot of automated tools available in the market that can at least save on your labor costs. Make no mistake about it, the price of error is, for the most part, fatal. It is very hard to get out of a Google penalty. By focusing on quality and focusing on natural links, you can go a long way in future proofing your current search engine results.
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