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03.05.07
The End of Black Hat SEO?
 By
Joe Lewis
Many SEO specialists have taken exception to repeated comments made by Jason Calacanis, who claims that the profession is mostly comprised of charlatans and two-bit tricksters who rely on little more than shady smoke and mirror tactics alongside technical chicanery to boost a site’s ranking within the major search engines.
While Jason’s estimate that 90% of the SEO industry is made up of black hat professionals may be a bit of a stretch, one cannot deny the fact that there are firms out there willing to employ less than ethical measures in order to achieve results.
The future for black hat SEOs, however, may be in question. In his interview with Matt Cutts, Gord Hotchkiss asks the Sultan of Spam Detection whether or not Google’s new Personalized Search features could represent a nail in the coffin for underhanded SEO firms.
Matt replies with the following:
I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily the nail in the coffin, but it’s clearly a call to action, where there’s a fork in the road and people can think hard about whether they’re optimizing for users or whether they’re optimizing primarily for search engines. And the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion, those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward.
At the same time, if you do choose to go to the other fork, towards the black hat side of things, you know you’re going to be working harder and the return is going to be a little less. And so over time, I think, the balance of what to work on does shift toward working for the user, taking these white hat techniques and looking for the sites and changes you can implement that will be to the most benefit to your user.
A diplomatic response, to be sure, but one that still offers a turbulent outlook for black hat SEOs who rely on reverse engineering tactics to essentially “game” Google’s algorithm to get that juicy spot within the search results.
Gord’s interview with Matt is quite extensive and covers a wide range of topics that benefit just about anyone looking to get a deeper insight into the future of search and the impact it will have on the optimization front.
About the Author:
Joe Lewis is a staff writer for WebProNews.
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