OMG…I’m a BlackHat SEO

Yeah, you read that right. And, you are too.

This all came about because I was trolling thru some forums (fora?) looking for news and update s in the SEO world. I came across a post where the person said….”If you do anything except write original content and submit to search engines, then you are a Blackhat SEO.“

Now that set me back a few paces. Later that night I thought about it some more. I went to Google and reviewed their webmaster guidelines.

Sure enough. If you follow a very strict interpretation of those guideline, you’d have to agree.

How many of us do any of the following?

• Write titles and headlines with keywords in mind.
• Use alt img tags to add variations on keywords.
• Use link title tags for the same purpose.
• Put keywords inside of bold tags.
• Put keywords inside of italics tags.
• Use ordered or unordered lists to contain keywords.
• Place keywords in strategic areas of the page.
• Manipulate the weight and proportion of keywords to text.
• Do recip linking, or other linking schemes?
• Write articles to get links.
• Operate a blog that is linked to your main site.
• Do you do anything (like ‘anything at all’) to improve your position in the search engine listings?

If you answered yes to any of the above…..you’re a BlackHat SEO! And all this time you thought you were a good guy WhiteHat.

Well, let me qualify that a little. Your hat is at least very dark, charcoal grey. Google would classify you as a black hat.

To really be a blackHat, you need to do quite a few more things. More on that in a different post.

~dink