The Google Test & Black Hat Techniques

[Justinfm]

It's funny, I've been a little out of the internet marketing world for a couple of years. I've been focusing on a local business and only peripherally aware of trends in IM. I come back and I still see quite a few SEO tricks being passed off as secrets and software that produces sites that are black hat.

By the way, I think the things people call "gray hat" are just things they are trying to convince you that you won't get caught for.

Google Test = Does what you are doing provide a better end user experience (better than the competition you are beating)

Ultimately it breaks down like this... Are you working with the same goals as Google or against them. It seems to me that Google's main goal is to provide a quality end user experience. This means if someone is search for something, Google wants to use it's own set of criteria to provide the most relevant content.

Now some may say, "Who is Google to make the decisions?" It seems to me that it's Google's house. If you rent a house from someone and they don't allow dogs, that doesn't mean you can hide your dog so they don't find out and not expect to be thrown out when the truth is revealed.

A good example of this is PR sculpting. I'm reading an ebook about this right now. It's really interesting and makes some good points. That said, I don't see how modifying the link to your contact page, so it doesn't effect page reputation, isn't something that Google would be against. I think this is represented by the "nofollow" feature not working as well for this as it used to. It wouldn't surprise me if Google starts actually dinging people who use that for internal links. I guess they probably won't do that for people who use javascript, however they certainly could create a formula that defeats Page Rank Sculpting.

Of course the author of this ebook points out how flawed this system is, and certainly it does seem to have it's problems.

Another thing I read recently had you bookmarking your site at a social bookmarking site, and than bookmarking the bookmark. When you look at something like that where it's so easy for the Google to figure it out, it just seems like you are asking for trouble.

Doesn't long term seo strategy just break down to creating a lot of good quality content related to the theme of your site, having relevant titles and headings for the pages, and having relevant incoming links to the pages including from within the site. If you create good content that people want to link to, you are building a foundation for your site that will be hard to beat.

Of course, I don't claim to be a search engine expert. I'm not even saying you shouldn't use black hat techniques. It's not my place to make that choice for you. All I'm really saying is that when you do something that is against what Google wants, don't be surprised when they slap you down.

Who this hurts the most is the newbies who haven't had sites black listed (or at least heard of it).

[Bingtran]

Nice post!

[Justinfm]

I thought someone might come along and disagree. It seems like some of the WSO's are for what I would consider black hat SEO. Maybe people feel like if they just ignore the truth it won't hurt them. Or maybe they read my post and dismiss me as someone who doesn't know what he's talking about.

[tferraro11]

Originally Posted by Justinfm

be surprised when they slap you down.

Who this hurts the most is the newbies who haven't had sites black listed (or at least heard of it).

Great post!! This also hurts the poeple that want a quick fix or quick results. Thats the type of people that are buying the WSO's. Its funny when people look at SEO prices and think $400.00 a month is expensive. These people dont understand the acctual work thats behind a true SEO strategy.

Excellent post again!!!

[dburk]

Hi Justinfm,

According to Google engineer Matt Cutts, PR sculpting using the nofollow attribute was changed more than 2 years ago. Any attempt to use the nofollow attribute for sculpting PR would have a negative effect on your own website rather than a positive one.

Sadly, nearly every ebook on the topic has given bad information since they were all published after the algorithm was changed. If you place the nofollow attribute on your internal links you are simply bleeding off PR needlessly. The only way to achieve effective PR sculpting is by restricting your linking to a small number of pages, not by using the nofollow attribute.

Source: PageRank sculpting

[Justinfm]

If Google changed so that they punish those who use nofollow for internal links, that would tell me they may do the same for people who seem to be using javascripts to do the same.

I can imagine you saying...
"But how will they find out?"

But are you going to under estimate the brains at Google?

The book I was looking at created a text link using javascript. To me that seems like something pretty easy for them to figure it out and start dinging people for it.

[dburk]

Hi Justinfm,

I don't believe Google is in the business of "punishing" people when it comes to SERP. It's more like they aren't willing to reward bad behavior. It appeared to me that the reason they changed how Pagerank flowed was to remove the incentive for PR sculpting since it was corrupting the intended flow of pagerank.

I doubt they have any real issue with the use of javascript links, they use them for AdSense and aren't likely to condemn others for a similar practice. They have announced the ability to follow javascript links a while back and have been testing it for some time.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Crawling through HTML forms

[Justinfm]

Originally Posted by dburk

I don't believe Google is in the business of "punishing" people when it comes to SERP. It's more like they aren't willing to reward bad behavior.

Sure they punish people (or more accurately sites) when they seek to manipulate the system. Granted, they may not black list your site for something like this, but it wouldn't surprise me if they don't knock your site down a notch for it.

I'm sure that Google can follow javascript links, it's more the concept of if those links count towards link reputation.