host posted on 十月 27, 2006 21:58
The business of search engine optimization is infested with sharks: scammers, swindlers, spammers and fraud artists. They are the Bad Guys of the Internet, and so like the Bad Guys in the old cowboy movies, we say they wear Black Hats. You could tell the good guys in the cowboy movies because they wore White Hats.
The practice of White Hat Search Engine Optimization, also known as Ethical SEO, aims to make it easier for the search engines to tell when your site's content is relevant to a query. In most cases we do this by making a site genuinely more useful to its human visitors, so that they will recommend it to others by linking it from their own websites. The most important White Hat technique is simply to have a website worth recommending. That is not easy by any means, and certainly can require a great deal of work, but it is the honest way, and the only way likely to yield lasting results.
But for every White Hat technique there is a Black Hat technique for simulating it. While I work hard to write articles that help one understand various topics that often turn out to rank well for the relevant keywords, the Black Hats write software to generate thousands of grammatically correct yet meaningless articles filled with keywords carefully chosen to draw search engine traffic and yield maximum ad revenue. While I depend on others to recommend my writing by linking my articles, the Black Hats operate link farms, thousands of pages all linking to the single site they wish to promote.
Black Hats of all sorts are known as "hackers", but that is a name they appropriated from those who originally wore the badge with honesty and pride, those who work hard and cleverly to develop computer software and hardware. I have been proud to call myself a hacker - the White Hat kind - for many years, so I prefer to call the dishonest ones Black Hat hackers. The Black Hat SEOs have the specialty of hacking the search engines to make money dishonestly. White Hat SEOs by contrast work to make it easier for the search engines to do a better job.
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