Search engine optimisation, or “Seo”, has for long periods of time been the primary goal for many webmasters. To begin with there really wasn’t much to it, but as the Internet is developing exponentially so does the competition – especially for any term that has money making potential.
Depending on the stuff you do to boost the search engine rankings of your site, it could be summed up as white-, black- or grey hat methods. The one mentioned first being approved things like putting only usable for your site, while the black hat approach would instead be strategies that the big-league search engines like yahoo, google, and msn are not going to like one bit – spamming other people’s blogs and forums with links to your site, to illustrate.
As one would expect, the grey hat methods land somewhere between “appropriate and inappropriate” and are things that you might accomplish, on condition that you use the setup with care. For the standard webmaster distinguishing between these methods isn’t at every turn all that straightforward, particularly with so many gurus offering to sell us their most modern superior guidance regarding gaining rankings and making money online.
“all i want is the money”
The ethics of the matter aren’t maybe as clear cut as one might guess either.
On the one hand it’s fairly clear that super seo’ed adsense sites filled with mock information – that could equally well read “ga ga ja da” or some resembling bunkum – are of zero value to the serious-minded Internet user, and no one likes to have their pet forum or blog spammed with flagrant plugs for super pills that promise to heighten sexual potency. As the search engines make their living on serving up relevant and of value information, it is only logical that they do not look on these black hat sites and methods with agreeing eyes.
On its side, the Internet is literally made up of it’s consumers and provided that you aren’t breaking any real laws, you are free to produce content in whatever manner you wish to. If you want to bring up a blog farm consisting of hundreds of blogs that has zero value to human visitors, there is nada but time and cost drawbacks stopping you from doing so.
Those who do this are in it fundamentally for the money – they promptly fabricate large amounts of webpages that takes into consideration particular keywords they can monetize in some way. The ambition of these sites isn’t to treat the visitor to anything of value, but to get him or her to click on an advert that will take him to a place where he will hopefully spend some money instead.
So in a way, this is certainly nought but a marketing tactic, and some people are by report making a very good living using similar business model.
For the “friendly and polite webmaster” though, who just desire to tell people about his pastime or wants to offer folks real products and services, it is probably a perfect idea to be careful with anything that could be determined black hat search engine optimisation.
Not seeing that it is morally a bit thin, but since it most likely will hurt his bottom line as a whole.