I've never made a big secret of the fact that as a commercial SEO and marketer, I am what most call a blackhat. When I change hats, it's gray at best. This is a choice that has brought up some interesting debates within my own blog, and occasionally on forums around the web. Since those conversations generally go a predictable place (but are always interesting), I thought it'd be nice to put the debate into the larger community.
I expect that most readers will not agree with what I write here and I'm fine with that; it's not for everyone. But I thought it may be good to at least put the ideas out there. I can only speak for myself here, but I believe many of these answers would be similar throughout the blackhat community. Please note that for the sake of this discussion, I'm separating hackers from blackhats. We are different, and the confusion benefits neither.
Also bear in mind that I do not take clients, so I'm not addressing that issue. Most skilled blackhats I know also do not take clients.
The "Ethics" of Blackhat (Vs. Google)
I have no qualms about "tricking" Google.
Rewind time to when search engines were a fresh idea, and many people thought they themselves were unethical. Search engines are not invited to sites. They copy/cache content, and do whatever they can to profit from this content they were never asked to access.
With this idea in mind, why would I not do the same as them, and attempt to profit from them profiting off of me? If I want to "opt out" of them crawling and not make money off of them, I'll deny by robots.txt. If they want to not make money off of me, they will "opt out" and remove my site.
Even ignoring the above statement, the double standards of SEO in the Google world make it quite difficult for someone to come in new to compete. I've mentioned YouTube Cloaking before. The New York Times apparently also gets this privilege. Well established sites with a substantial advertising budget? Those will never be banned or penalized. Many use blatant "doorway" pages, and will never have anything done against them. Any new site? Banned. So sometimes, a bit of stealth is necessary.
So from that alone, it's obvious that even if I was whitehat, Google would still not care about my business. They are handing entire control of niches over by way of green lighting (or ignoring) large and entrenched corporations who use practices I could not touch.
I can accept this; I believe no one is entitled to a rank just because they play by the rules, and Google shouldn't have to worry about each business. There's only so many rankings to go around. But at the same time, I'm going to not going to change my business to help Google's business. Rather than stagnate, I compete.
The last major point is that I'm not at all confident in the true longevity of most [competitive] sites. Rules change, especially with Google. Before they began aggressively attacking paid links, how many people felt their sites were secure? The sense I got was the vast majority. Restriction has been slowly tightening since then from everything I've seen and experienced. If I'm going to pour hours and hours of development time into building a site, I want to know it's going to rank. I don't want to worry about miscellaneous "guidelines" changes, or "special cases". I don't want to worry about some Google base or local dropdown knocking my site down 5 inches. I don't even want to worry about the possibility of negative SEO. I don't want to put my faith in one individual site. I'd rather distribute the risk.
The "Ethics" of Blackhat (Vs. Webmasters)
After the ethics vs. Google conversation subsides, normally it changes to "what about the webmasters you're ranking above? Don't you feel bad cheating?"
Once again, no. First and foremost, no one is entitled to rank just because they play by an arbitrary set of rules that no one really ever agreed to, signed, or otherwise implied was ok. If that's the lay of the land, perhaps I should be able to make some rules. Would it be unethical for random people I meet on the street to not follow those? I think not.
Beyond that, my view is that in business our success is dictated by the risks we are, or are not willing to take. Any site I end up outranking made their decision to play it safe, and that was a perfectly respectable call. I'm sure they'll enjoy their ranking for many months after the blackhat site has been reported by a disgruntled SEO and is banished from the rankings. My decision was to not play it safe, and as a result their are consequences for the action. These choices are not moral judgements and they are not indications of personality outside of business. They are business models. Longevity vs. Fast income. Neither is inherently better than the other. They are just different. There is reward for risk.
Conclusion
I suspect I'll take some heat for this. But in a internet landscape where Google is essentially revolting against competitive SEO with tight restrictions, "usability" additions that remove emphasis from the search results and onto maps, Google Base/Checkout, and their paid listings, I do not feel at all comfortable investing my money into a site that may or may not be alive/ranking/in a niche where ranking still matters several years from now. Google is looking out for Google, and no one else. I will do the same.
As soon as clients are added into the picture, this entire ethical beast changes direction a bit. But hey, that's for another entry someday.
As always, constructive criticism or intelligent debate is welcome. My only request is that nothing get abusive.
If you liked this post(or just feel the need to spy on us evil types), feel free to drop by. I write regularly at Slightly Shady SEO covering whichever topics I feel like (typically PPC/SEO) and always enjoy a lively debate š
Images courtesy of Charl22, stephenccwu and Jana Mills
“If I want to āopt outā of them crawling and not make money off of them, Iāll deny by robots.txt. If they want to not make money off of me, they will āopt outā and remove my site.”
Brilliant.. I have said for years that allowing a for profit company to determine how “you” do business with no responsibility on their part was silly..
And Doug, I remember the time before modern search engines quite well.. And I remember when the first meta crawlers started putting ads on the results and making money off of “us”..
In the end there’s worse things you could do, rob a bank, kill someone – playing games with the G is fun.
People are beginning to mix “the internet” and “google” to being the same thing, probably to the glee of the G, but this is not the case – there’s more to the internet than google, in the end all google does is index the whole web, its not the content creator its just an index, however clever it is people use it as a stop gap – if a dude ranks first because he is smarter than the index all power to him, the person should realise that like other advertising, perhaps put in places they weren’t expecting to see its essentially still advertising.
Black hat doesn’t have to be all about spammy, and guys its not like we are talking about hacking your mums msn…
While I don’t delve in blackhat SEO I don’t think those that do are evil. I simply don’t have the time to do so. Contrary to what many believe running black hat campaigns takes a lot of time and commitment. Sure the positive results come fast and furiously but they are usually short lived. Which means it is necessary to constantly be trying new techniques and burning through countless domains.
Good black hats don’t worry about a site getting banned because they generally have 1000s more in waiting. While there sites move in and out mine are more steady and long lasting. This is not an ethical issue it is a business issue (like you said). Like you mentioned in an earlier post on your site there are a lot of things that white hats can learn from black hats including the need to constantly try new things and test test test. Good post.
@Mark – you mean you don’t delve in to black hat “now”.. Neither did most of the people buying text ads on websites.. Then Google changed the rules and made all of those people evil black hats without regard to their actual reasons for buying the advertising.. Not to mention all of the now evil black hat webmasters that dared to “sell” ads on their websites..
You also have those nasty link exchanges that Google used to tell you to go out and get and now they tell you not to.. Or at least tell you that they aren’t worth very much..
One other point that occurred to me after reading this thread yesterday, was how the BlackHats of this world have made Google a better search engine. BlackHats are like the ultimate QA team. Try every imaginable trick in the book to twist, circumvent, and break the software that is Google. Then, when that doesn’t work, they rewrite the book, and start again. BlackHats are the best testing team Google never paid for. The rest of us should be thanking them for improving our search experience š
Xmcp is right… Look at things another way. When you play basketball you know the rules. Imagine a referee that can call in a construction crew and put any obstacle they want in front of YOUR basket.. and let your opponent have a bigger basket a the same time.
It’s happening – major corporations are being worse than most black hats. And they DO NOT get penalized. Some even get rewarded beyond more legit websites.
SS, as always a thought provoking post.
As a Whitehat (only by virtue of the fact that I have zero programming skills and some content creation ones) I think we all have our own kind of ban hammer hanging over us. The ever changing system and those pesky base/maps/GoogleCrap mean that we may be thrown on the heap just as easily.
This was really brought home when I started seeing Google books results “ranking” better than mine and sending Amazon clicks through Google’s account instead of my own.
There is only one business with all the power in the end.
Rob
Wow, thats a nice perspective on it. Google makes money from us if they don’t like what we do then they will choose not to use us to make money.
BTW nice pic.
Thoroughly entertaining post, for the first time I’m able to see black hat as more than a cheap con and an excuse to litter the net with rubbish.
I think that I actually understand your point of view, especially regarding your unwillingness to be dictated to by Google. Just because they’re big and powerful doesn’t mean they have the right to lord it over everyone.
I still don’t entirely agree with black hat seo, but you’ve opened my eyes as to what it really means to practitioners.
Interesting stuff. It’s always annoyed me that we put this down to “ethics” when, as has been said, SEO is about business, and the two have never played well together. Besides, ethics are totally objective – one man’s white hat looks black to another, and the only absolute reference we have is Google’s webmaster guidelines, and last time I checked they hadn’t ascended to the status of God quite yet, so shouldn’t really be defining ethics.
The reason I don’t tend to do anything too shady to the sites I work on is I wouldn’t want to explain to my boss that I got a client’s site banned. It’s not a question of ethics to me, more a question of risk management. If I wanted to make some cash pretty quickly, however, I’d totally go for black hat.
TO be honest I can try all the methods I hear about, I’m not really fussed which hat category they fall into and i’m sure that most offline businesses would do the same as long as it wasn’t illegal.
Sorry but I was a total whitehat, ok maybe dabbled at not washing it for a few months but that was that.
That was before Google decided that youTube was allowed to cloak!
Google decided YouTube can cloak fair enough, but they cant then moan when I cloak, they have now set the standard not me.
NYT, ok that was different if it was ebay or amazon I probably wouldn’t be so understandable but I’m sorry youTube, I mean please.
Would you tell your kids dont do drugs it can ruin your life, then stick a needle in your arm right in front of them? of coarse not. So why can they say don’t cloak and then do it anyway.
Please, I would never have converted before, but now screw them lets just cause them as much crap as we can.
My only real problem with “black hat” comes from some of the tactics – for example spamming. I spend a lot of time fighting spam posted on my forums and other sites, as far as I’m concerned those people are abusing my site (my property) for their ends. It’s like someone spray painting advertising on my house, it’s wrong.
Cloaking? Don’t really care, I don’t do it. I can see why some would, and I can see why google is against it. Maybe I’d try it if I were making a “throw-away” site, but I’m not in that line of work.
chris writes “But you want to tell Google how to run their site, right?”
no. that’s exactly the point that xmcp is making here. no one is telling google anything…its exactly the opposite situation.
my earlier comment, “i have to make a nice website for the sake of the internet? says who? make your own damn site and leave me alone.” was aimed at you chris, if you are the same chris that commented earlier than i had, and doug heil.
sometimes i use google, but i’m not actively campaigning for the company to make more money. to me, you “for the sake of the users” guys are just propping up google’s propaganda and are helping perpetuate their campaign to command webmasters to fit into their model and make google more money.
that’s not really my bag. i am going to worry about my mission and let google worry about theirs. it’s not for everyone, but i dig it.
I don’t feel guilty manipulating SERPs using methods search engines are not too keen on. I don’t feel guilty exploiting holes. If the door is open there is nothing stopping you from walking in. I do whatever I need to do in order to achieve a certain result. If people have a problem with this, they can either follow or get lost. However I would never do anything illegal or damaging to the advertiser or anyone else in that case. To me blackhat is sneaky but not illegal.
Not illegal Yet. Just wait until that one big lawsuit comes up against a Spammer and the one who got hurt because of the spam wins that lawsuit. It’s coming boys and girls.
Oh wait; there already was a suit. Massa Vs. Google. Google won. Go figure?
You all praising this article and blackhats, and stating that all is fine and dandy are going to be in for a very rude awakening soon. You can take that to the bank.
Hahahah, all you white hat people make me laugh.
This is about making money, period. Do it however you can for as long as you can.
Screw Google and their rules. I’d rather be “shady” and make a few thousand this week, then spend hours writing articles and making chump change and not being able to pay my bills.
Mo Money, Mo Problems.
@Doug: No one. Gets. Hurt. And by the way, Massa SUED GOOGLE. Not the other way around. Part of blackhat is dealing with the banning/penalization of sites as they come.
And Doug. How can you honestly take this hard line against blackhat when Google itself is cloaking?
Corey, if you don’t want Goolge traffic, just use robots.txt to noindex. If you are like most people, you do want this traffic.
Do you have a signed agreement from Google that guarantees that when people go to http://www.goolge.com to search their index, your site is displayed in their results? If so, you should file a lawsuit right now if they are not doing this. If you don’t have any business agreement in place with Google that guarantees your cloaked site traffic or impressions from Google users, then I’m not sure what case you (or anyone else) has in complaining how Google runs their site.
I can’t believe that people still fail to grasp the hypocrisy of complaining about how Google runs their search results on their own site.
Shady; You say no one gets hurt by your spam websites? Oh my; I never would have believed you were this naive. Sorry.
And you say that Google cloaks? LOL Funny stuff. You have lots to learn about things shady. You are still very, very young, so you have plenty of time.
I have no further comments as it’s very obvious the industry has major problems judging from this thread. Too many to bother mentioning or discussing.