Search engine optimization and marketing is generally classified into two groups, white hat and black hat.

White Hat

What hat is that which abides by the generally accepted rules and regulations that search engines have created.  This generally includes original content and a clear indication of whether or not something has been paid for (reviews, links, etc).

Black Hat

Black hat is that which does whatever it wants regardless of what search engines say.  Black hats generally include spam, cloaking, and other techniques to mislead and trick either users, search engines or both.

Generally people think that white hats are good and black hats are bad.  While that is a common misconception, it’s not true.  Since there are no laws regulating the search industry, what black hats are doing is not abiding by a companies rules.

Imagine the black hat situation like this, if Pepsi called you tomorrow and told you to stop drinking Coca-Cola products or else you can’t drink Pepsi any longer, what would you do?  You would most likely get angry that Pepsi thinks they have a right to tell you what to do, and then start drinking whatever you feel like.

Search engine marketing is the same way.  Google (a company) tells people what to do (use NoFollow for paid links, don’t sell links or reviews, don’t cloak, give people exactly what they’re looking for, etc) and if you don’t do what they say, you’re not allowed to drink their Pepsi (or be in their search engine).

Sounds a little crazy doesn’t it.  Keep in mind that in this industry, Google has the only drink that tastes good, everything else is crap.  That means that if you don’t play by the rules, and Google finds out, you’re forced to rely on traffic from other sources, those crappy sources.

White hats on the other hand pump out quality content for most of their lives and usually don’t make the kind of money that black hats can make.  Black hats are constantly working because if they don’t work they stop making money.  White hat sites keep making money for years to come because they have high quality (think Fresno) content and trusted links.

So in my mind black hats aren’t bad, they’re just different.  If I had the technical skills and ability to write code who knows which side of the fence I’d be on.

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