A reflection by Sean Voorhies, Account Supervisor
90octane Account Supervisor Sean Voorhies discusses his opinions on recent allegations that SEO is cheating the search system.
Imagine you’re driving on a dirt road. It’s nighttime. Your headlights are dim. You’re trying to find a friend’s house but there are no street signs and only a few faintly recognizable landmarks. You can see houses glowing in the distance but you aren’t sure where to turn or how to find what you’re looking for.
Contrast that image to that of the city. There are street lights, street signs and the roads are clearly marked and register on your GPS. You may not know where you are going, but you can say with certainty that you know how to get there.
To the search engines, content on the web that is optimized using legitimate (or white hat) SEO tactics is equivalent to city street signs, lights and road maps. Optimized content helps to guide and direct engines and searchers to the right places, showcasing the right results and providing a map of the web.
Black hat tactics seek to manipulate the search engine’s results through cloaked pages, hidden text or illegitimate link farms. They cloud and distort the picture of the web by faking the importance and relevance of their content. Search engine algorithms have improved tremendously and can now filter black hat tactics fairly successfully—but abuse does still exist. This past December, Google discovered that JCPenney used black hat tactics to earn top result rankings for searches. JCPenny was penalized and now ranks much lower across search results, but it took an outing by the New York Times (“Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets“) to help Google realize what JCPenny was doing.
By working with search engines to identify, map and rank content according to legitimate keywords and practices, websites help the engine provide their intended audiences with the kind of information they are looking for.
There’s that saying: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” In the same fashion, SEO isn’t the devil, black hat tactics are.
