Articles -- White Hat vs. Black Hat Stuff

Keeping Your White Hat Clean:
How Often to Check Your Outbound Links

March 15, 2006

Nowadays, having a website is becoming a tremendous responsibility. If you own a website, you need to do at least the following things, and do them on a regular basis:

Make sure your domain name doesn't expire;
Comply with the latest quality standards in terms of graphic design, copywriting, usability;
Keep your coding at least moderately tidy;
Add fresh content from time to time, and apply necessary changes to your existing content as it gets obsolete;
Constantly watch legal issues ensuring your website doesn't break any laws;
Study your web statistics carefully and improve your users' experiences to make sure it converts better and better;
Track your ROI;
Check if anybody is stealing your web copy or other copyrighted materials and take legal action against those who do.

That sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it? But now I've got some bad news for you: you've got yet another duty in regard to your website, which is to keep it clean in terms of SEO (unless you are a black hat SEO and don't care about such things).

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How to Tell Black from White: The First Thing to Learn

Irina Ponomareva |

February 28, 2006

If you are very new to SEO and are just considering learning the basics of it, you are probably asking yourself what you should start with. You have probably heard about some mysterious things like keyword density or Google PageRank; someone might have told you that these things are vital for your future success in SEO.

Is it true?

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Avoiding Bad Neighbourhoods: How to Link Out Safely

Irina Ponomareva |

December 29, 2005

As far as achieving better SEO results is concerned, the reality these days is that knowing how to detect sites that use spammy SEO techniques is becoming more important than knowing where to place your keywords. With spammy sites growing in number at a tremendous rate and the search engines severely penalising websites for linking to such neighbourhoods, we simply can't neglect the issue any longer.

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White Hat Linking

Irina Ponomareva |

September 21, 2005

SEO and link building always go side by side. From the earliest days of SEO, even before it had a name, people studying the search engines' behaviour noticed that the number of links pointing to the site improved the rankings of that site very significantly in all search engines. Some engines give the link popularity factor less weight, and others pay more attention to it, but they all use it to some extent in their ranking algorithms.

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SEO, Spam, and the Confusion
Are All White Hats Equally White?

Irina Ponomareva |

August 13, 2005

In my previous article, SEO, Spam, and the Controversy |, I mentioned search engine spam and the harm it does, explained why white hat SEO is often (and rightly) also called ethical SEO, and why black hat SEO is considered unethical by many (but not all) whitehats. I also gave examples of the arguments often used by blackhats to justify their actions, along with my counter arguments. The main purpose of that article was to sum up the latest hot forum discussions on SEO ethics, SEO spam and other closely related issues. But it turned out that those discussions were too hot and those related issues too numerous to be covered in one article; thus, I had to boot up my PC again and start another one, this time dedicated mostly to highlighting disagreements between different groups of SEO practitioners, all of whom consider themselves whitehats.

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SEO, Spam, and the Controversy
Ethical SEO Issues Further Discussed

Irina Ponomareva |

August 9, 2005

Some recent hot discussions about the same old White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO theme have been - quite unexpectedly - very enlightening, and have highlighted a lot of pertinent points and facts. Some of those points are sad, but others give certain hope and show that the SEO/SEM industry might still have a brighter future. And there's another point they have proven: no matter how many discussions on the topic take place, there is always room for another one. And no matter how many articles about ethical and unethical SEO, spam and SEO hats are written, there is always the demand for more. So, I decided to write another article on the topic, summing up several forum threads I have recently read (and, in many cases, got directly involved into), typical arguments used by all parties, my own thoughts, conclusions and predictions.

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SEO: The Importance of an Ethical Approach

Irina Ponomareva |

March 1, 2005

It is, of course, always preferable to deal with an ethical practitioner, no matter what the business in question is. But SEO, by its nature, is one of the most sensitive industries, and here such issues as ethics or ethical business conduct are discussed, year after year, with a lot of heat and passion.

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Improve The Search Engine Rankings Without Losing Quality

Irina Ponomareva |

August 17, 2004

What is real search engine optimisation? If you are just considering SEO for your site and looking for further information on what SEO is and how it works, you can be easily misled by widespread yet dangerous opinions and incorrect advice. The sources of SEO-related information are numerous, and nobody really controls their reliability. The Internet is quite democratic, and everyone is free to publish any sort of information online. This freedom of speech is great but sometimes unsafe. Search engine optimisation is a good example of the dark side of this freedom. You are sure to strike some SEO-related advice given with an air of confidence, but if you apply it to your own site, you may find it banned from the search engine indices – sooner or later.

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Inappropriate Website Promotion Methods

Irina Ponomareva |, Dmitry Antonoff |

December 19, 2003

The list of dubious means of search engine optimisation lengthens year on year. In theory, of course, we could all employ such means, but there are ethical issues to be tackled. And even if we ignore fair-play principles for a moment, it's worth pointing out that cheap, scam-like promotion methods usually look cheap and scam-like, annoy Internet users and have a short lifespan because counter-measures are created.

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