Dallas Business and Marketing Blog

I recently did a post where much of the satire was lost on many of the readers. It was angled as an open letter to Google and pointed out ways that SEOs in general have made Google and other Search Engines for that matter better, not worse as it is often claimed by some individuals. If you read the comments on it you will see a wide swing of opinions.

It did however, bring up an interesting set of questions for me. In a nut shell where are the lines between Black Hat, White Hat and Spamming. I am not going to discuss White and Black to much and where the gray areas are there. It has been done many times, what I want to talk about today is when does Black Hat equal spam?

Some would say they are one in the same, I disagree and do so with real conviction. I think we should remember that “spamming” in the beginning was simple unsolicited commercial email. Then as comment “spam” and forum “spam” came into existence “spam” (as a word) came to mean more then just unwanted emails. Then next thing we know it is being used to describe certain practices that many people want to call SEO.

Here is the line between Black Hat and Spam as I see it. Anything you can call spam I feel could also be considered a Black Hat technique as most people use the word but not the other way around. Here are two examples,

1. You build a website about let’s say hotels and you use the US Postal Database to create 60,000 pages each with random and scraped content to make them appear unique. With a bit of rotational content via PHP or CFM or something to that effect you create the illusion that not only are these pages unique but updated and changed often. With this you rank for tons of city and township searches for long tail terms with the word “hotel”. The pages just push people into ads and perhaps an affiliate program using a Hotels.com search tool.

Is this Black Hat? - Yes, I would say so. It won’t work the way it did in say 2001 so it may be a poor attempt at Black but it is Black.

Is it spam? - To me yes this is a very accurate way to describe this practice. This is using automatic content generation to send thousands upon thousands of false results into the SERPs. One can clearly see the analogy to sending 60,000 emails to some list you buy or build through malicious methods. It is also a great way to get caught, devalued and possibly banned by the Engines.

2. You build a high quality web site and go out and broker deals with other site owners for links. You optimize the content on and off site and you push links not just to your site but to the sites that link to it. You build widgets and bury links in them and give them to bloggers. You start a blog and submit some of the articles to social sites.

Is that Black Hat? I think if you ask a group of SEOs you will get many different opinions about which of those are and are not Black Hat. I don’t consider it Black at all if you are ranking a site for things it is actually about with those techniques and other SEOs will call every bit of what I mentioned above Black Hat. Still others will be more in the middle and say some of this is Black, some Gray and other parts are fine. I think this is a subjective argument that I leave to others for now.

Is that Spam? - I say no this isn’t spam it is not an attempt to take tens of thousands of listings in Google with low quality junk pages. It is an attempt to gain specific search engine ranks via a variety of methods, some which are at least gray but I would not call this “spamming the SERPs”.

So what do you think? What is the line between “Black” or “Gray” Hat SEO and Search Engine Spamming or say Link Spamming. Is a link a spam link simply because of the intent or must it also have something to do with the method?

Popularity: 15% [?]