Greg Jarboe is the guru of cranking up web visibility through effective optimization of press
releases and leveraging news search. Greg went to a search conference in Sweden and managed to take a ‘black hat’ to dinner when the conference was over. In between courses, the black hat confessed he was thinking about crossing the line from ‘evil’ to ‘good’, meaning he started to see ‘white hat’ SEO was catching up with ‘black hat’ SEO, and the future wasn’t looking as bright as it used to in his dark corner of the market. Here’s a rabbit that popped out of the hat, taken from an article from the hand of Gord Hotchkiss, the President and CEO of Enquiro.
"Up to now, online has been the Wild West. The sheriff hadn’t come to town yet. Black hats could get mediocre sites to the top of the rankings because the vast majority of legit sites had no clue about search engine optimization. Reams of content were hidden in content management systems, locked off from the search engines by impenetrable dynamic URLs. [...]
Brands are clueing into the importance of algorithmic search. Spider friendliness is usually a requirement in evaluations of new CMS solutions or site redesigns. And when you take a site that has thousand of pages of content, with rich internal linking structures and scads of legitimate, authoritative incoming links, it will jump to the top of the search results. It’s inevitable. [...]
Today, these huge brands are turning to white hat search practitioners to help unlock the full potential of their sites. [...] It doesn’t matter what tricks a black hatter has up their sleeve, you can’t beat the sheer bulk of these killer sites, as long as they’re properly optimized.
So, as the online geography becomes more civilized through the influx of legitimate business, black hats are forced to move off Main Street into the back alleys. There’s less territory for them to operate in. And now, they’re competing for position against other black hats who are as ruthless as they are, rather than against naïve site owners who have never heard of a meta tag or Pagerank. It gets harder to make a buck."
From [Enquiro] – Read the entire article ‘A Whiter Shade of Black‘
by Gord Hotchkiss.
This content is copyrighted by Enquiro Search Solutions Inc.
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