For a long time, I’ve held the personal belief that being the best search marketer you can be requires knowledge of a vast information set. This includes black hat tactics – the unethical, the illegal, and those that merely violate a website’s TOS or search engine’s guidelines (or walk that fine line). Naturally, the SEO blogosphere has a number of places where this material is discussed, from forums and blogs to wikis and articles, but my stance has historically been to never suppress this type of content on SEOmoz, and in fact to encourage discovery and discussion. I’ve found that, at least for me, the more I know about what black hats do and what tactics exist, the better I am at every aspect of my job – from advising clients to protecting sites to identifying manipulative competitors and knowing which boundaries to cross and which to avoid.
However, a series of experiences provided a catalyst to re-examine my position regarding our publication. In the spirit of transparency, I’ll describe them as best I can to help provide an accurate perspective:
- We’ve received some harsh criticism from those who engage in black/gray hat practices and been asked to STFU about these topics. Spam, obviously, succeeds more when less is known about it, so it’s natural for those with a potential interest to keep it close to the vest.
- We’ve gotten some very angry comments/emails/posts written about exposing specific sites that engage in manipulative practices as well, both from the site owners themselves and from those who don’t think “outing” spammers is an appropriate practice for those in the SEO field.
- Several folks who work for search engines have expressed disappointment and frustration in our open discussions of these topics, both because they’re worried that our coverage will appear to be an endorsement and because they feel a wide audience with knowledge of this material, even when accompanied by an appropriate warning, may attempt more abuse of their systems (and perhaps for other reasons that I haven’t heard as well).
- We recently lost a very large, very important contract due to the client asking a respected source in the search community about our work and hearing that our work is “black hat and could get them banned from the engines.” Apparently, this association came not from any “black hat” work we’ve done, but from the blog post content 🙁
- In our upcoming Expert Seminar here in Seattle, we mentioned that search engine representatives would not be present, and despite my specific announcement that the seminar would contain no black hat material, this was seen as a sign to some that we’d be going into gray/black hat territory. The real reason we don’t have search engineers is that we have a partnership with Third Door Media (who runs the SMX conference series), and we wanted to be as careful as possible to position our “training” as true “training” with none of the conference elements (blogging, search reps, multiple panels, expo hall, keynotes, etc). In hindsight, I should have made this crystal clear from the beginning. Let me be 100% clear now – the reason for no search reps at the show has NOTHING to do with presenting black hat material. We honestly wouldn’t even know how to give high-level material on that topic, as none of us have ever run spammy, manipulative (or even affiliate) sites. We did this to differentiate the seminar from the format of shows like SES San Jose and the SMX series. To be bluntly honest, if it weren’t for this concern, I would have gladly invited search engine reps and been honored if they would have accepted. It would be good for the seminar, the attendees, and the SEOmoz brand to have them present.
- In that same conference, we also gave the horribly misleading title of “Black Hat Tactics & Search Engine Penalties/Dodging Spam Detection” to Nick Gerner’s presentation. Although the descriptive text below does a good job explaining what Nick’s actually presenting on, a far more accurate title – “Avoid Being Labeled a ‘False Positive’ – How Black Hat Tactics Impact White Hat Websites” – should have been given from the start.
- Blog posts such as our WB Friday Give it Up and White Hat Cloaking suggested that we might be endorsing or recommending black hat tactics. I believe this is due to misinterpretation or a careless reading/listening to the caveats and warnings we provided, but it’s true that particularly on the web (but nearly everywhere in life), content often comes through with a very different perception than how the message was intended.
Now, naturally, there are literally thousands of topics we could cover on the blog, and while we believe in diversity of information and I personally believe in sharing white hat, gray hat, black hat, and every other kind of known method that Internet marketers conduct business, I feel that perhaps the SEOmoz community would rather we expend effort on content that any and every website can use, and can/will turn elsewhere to learn about black/gray hat tactics.
So today, I’m bringing this issue to you, our community, as a pointed question: Do you believe SEOmoz should continue to share gray/black hat tactics & content via the public blog & articles?
Your feedback here is greatly appreciated, and we will take it extremely seriously.
BTW – For those wondering how black hat SEOmoz really is, the truth is that we’re pansies. While I’m fascinated by web spam and all the subtleties and fine points that surround it, we’ve never recommended anything more gray hat than some user agent cloaking to get rid of duplicate content (which, according to Stephan Spencer’s post, all the major engines endorse) and some link buying (which, while it does violate search engine guidelines, is, IMO, a necessary part of many link building campaigns and very light gray on the hat scale). We’ve never had a client’s site get banned from the engines, never had a person who got advice from us in Q+A report back that our suggestions got them into trouble, and never had to hide a client or site we worked on out of the fear of being penalized. Matt Cutts noted on his blog years ago that one of our clients bought a link from the Harvard University student newspaper – that’s as far as I can ever recall pushing the guidelines. And long before that, pre-SEOmoz, I personally engaged in some foolishly underhanded link trading (apology is here).
For those who are interested in my personal take on search spamming as a general practice, read this black hat vs. white hat search spam debate I participated in with Mick Sawyer in June of 2005 (still surprisingly relevant & enjoyable!).
