
White Hat SEO: It F$#ing Works - ssclafani
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421
======
patio11
This is largely true, and you should read it. One caution: SEO is a little bit
of marketing and a little bit of engineering. You know what both of these
fields have in spades? Project risk. You can do competent execution of a good
idea which "should" work, even an idea which _does_ work simultaneously for
someone else, and have it fizzle on you.

I am totally not saying this wearing my consultant who wants your money hat:
you often will make repeated investments in getting this right, have no
discernible success with some, and _continue_ having to do so _for forever_ as
your business evolves. It isn't a matter of tweaking titles once and getting
back to "real work."

~~~
pstack
I held the top spot for search terms relating to my service and site for more
than a decade, until I shut it down. I never spent one second of my life
worrying about SEO. I focused on usability, generating word of mouth (far more
valuable - how do you think people found out about Facebook and Twitter?), and
content.

The nature of a search engine is to derive the value of your content from the
content. Therefore, focusing on your content is a far greater return in value
than focusing on trying to draw the attention of a search engine to tags, meta
data, or URL paths. Not saying that those things don't contribute, but I'm not
certain that the ROI is worthwhile.

Think of it like a resume. If you have the talent and background to put on a
resume, you'll get consideration. You don't need to spend hours upon hours
refining it to add just the right trendy keywords or ordering things in the
most appealing way to automated resume readers. On the other hand, if you have
little to offer and you are concerned that you'll be weeded out quickly as a
result, you can substitute your background and experience (content) with
keywords and other tricks to try and get beyond the initial weeding out. Kind
of a tactic of desperation and lack of confidence.

I do have a strong bias against the whole SEO thing. I won't pretend that I
don't. I'm put off when I hear people focusing on it rather than content and
it makes me think of greasy, scummy, snake-oil salesmen. Guys on late night
infomercials trying to convince you that you can skip everything and get right
to becoming rich and famous by thumbing through their special book and
employing their special techniques for flipping property with only two hours
of work per week.

This is probably a very unpopular opinion to share around a group like this,
but what can I say?

~~~
a5seo
We all have our biases, but not all biases are legitimate.

I'm biased as a developer who started a site that ranked top 3 for about 5K
very competitive long tail phrases. So I've seen first hand the enormous
benefit of allowing some time/effort/thought toward usability for bots.

It's not a given that Google will just "figure it out" and your reward will be
in heaven. Anyone who thinks that is just hoping Google will do their job for
them.

The upside for me is not having to work for the man thanks to selling the
aforementioned site.

~~~
tga
I think the key phrase here is 'usability for bots'. If you recognize bots as
an important customer (after all, they bring over most of your new traffic),
then it makes sense to optimize things for them to find. That said, somewhere
in between of not writing your whole site in Flash and creating a link farm,
things start getting slimy and your arbitrary line will likely differ from,
say, Google's.

~~~
rahoulb
I think the difference between the best SEO agencies and the majority is that
the best continually run experiments to try and understand what Google is
doing. This takes no little skill and a lot of time and effort.

The rest just read and regurgitate the results of those experiments when the
experimenter decides to release those results (ie when it's not too much of a
competitive advantage).

------
a5seo
Another reason to stay whitehat that Rand doesn't mention: it can screw your
acquisition prospects.

Anyone in the business of buying SEO-driven sites (Demand Media, Internet
Brands, Quinstreet, Specific Media, WhaleShark Media, etc.) looks VERY closely
at the backlink profiles of acq candidates. They aren't going to do it unless
they're clean, or if they sense there were blackhat links, they're going to
discount the price massively.

I've watched several acquisitions go down the drain on account of perceived
spam.

~~~
jonkelly
Having been part of one of the M&A teams mentioned, I'll second that. We used
to talk a lot about "real" sites vs. those that were built around practices
that made them rank quickly. I'll note that none of those teams are perfect
(nor are any sites that I looked at), but black-hat tactics are a huge part of
the deal analysis.

------
corin_
Loads of examples of companies that have apparently seen success with "white
hat" SEO doesn't prove anything, without also showing what they have done to
get that search ranking, and also showing that they _haven't_ used "black hat"
techniques.

~~~
dasil003
Proof is a pretty high bar for any SEO assertion. You can (and should) apply
the scientific method to SEO for years, and still never arrive at objective
data because much like economics, experiments tend not to be reproducible to
any great degree. The architects of the search engines are in an arms race
against the black hats.

Which brings me to my next point: the gradient between black and white hat SEO
is very wide and gray. The perception of hat color is largely dependent on the
perceiver's opinion of the content in question. That's why Calacanis swears up
and down Mahalo is not spam, and why no one here buys it.

~~~
corin_
Yeah, I wasn't complaining that conclusive evidence should have been included,
more than, because of the lack of proof, a list of examples shouldn't be used
to make the point at all.

~~~
dasil003
What else is there though?

~~~
corin_
I've no idea, I have little/no experience with SEO. But someone showing a list
of websites and saying "these did well with white hat SEO - see, it does
work!" doesn't convince me to agree with either side of the argument.

------
danshapiro
Rand applies the label "SEO" quite liberally, and I think it does everyone
involved a disservice. If you look to see which sites linked to your last post
and pinged them the next time you post to let them know there's new content,
is that SEO? If you research the topics your target market are interested in
and then address them, is that SEO? If you contact bloggers and media about
your new product and encourage them to write about you and link to you, is
that SEO?

Maybe you call it that. But I think it's about optimizing for searchers as
much or more than it's about optimizing for search engines. Whatever it is,
it's valuable, and "White hat SEO" (aka "marketing") has an important place in
the weapons chest of startups.

------
TillE
How in the world is lib.nmsu.edu/rarecat a top search result? If I do the
search and go to Google's cached version, it tells me "These terms only appear
in links pointing to this page: buy propecia"

It's actually a really good collection of links for anyone interested in
medieval manuscripts. Bookmarked.

~~~
duskwuff
The page title shows up in the search as "buy propecia price - NMSU Library".
My guess would be some sort of old HTML injection attack that's been cleaned
out, but which hasn't fully flushed out of the index.

What's really odd is the two college sites below that, which don't have
anything obvious about Propecia on them...

~~~
andymurd
Maybe the page content is cloaked so that googlebot sees completely different
text to human visitors.

~~~
ddemchuk
this is most likely what is going on

------
forgot_password
Rand assumes that the top ranking sites today that produce great content got
that way through white-hat techniques. I have no idea whether Zillow, Oyster,
or Zappos never engaged in shady SEO practices and I doubt he does either.

Also, one minor addition...if your domain is naturally uninteresting, that
should affect your competitors as well. One can argue that having an exciting
domain that breeds lots of natural links is actually a bad thing for a startup
because it's harder to rise over your entrenched competitors.

~~~
teyc
Rand does. He sells a web crawler service that does the same thing as Google's
"link:" operator before Google closed it off.

~~~
underdown
Open site explorer is not a time machine. It's a snapshot of links TODAY. Your
assertion is flatly false.

~~~
InfinityX0
Google is a snapshot of links TODAY. Links that no longer almost certainly
pass no value. Rand is wrong about a few of the domains on the list, as they
have done shady SEO in the past. Also, OSE.org is not a fluid list - it only
crawls a sliver of the web, and their index is not nearly as comprehensive as
Google's. It was updated a week or so ago, and before that, had not been
updated for a month and a half.

------
mattmanser
The bit that confuses me is the list he included of what an SEO needs to do.
It seems to me that as an SEO he's actually forgotten what his job is. There's
a lot in that list that have _absolutely_ nothing to do with SEO.

The clue is in the name SEO. Search Engine Optimization. Out of the entire
list, only a third are SEO.

This is something I've seen SEO people and UX people do in so many blogs.
They're not really sure what their job is so they pick a bunch of fun business
stuff they'd actually like to be doing, that they have little or no experience
in and call it SEO/UX. Then they can work on fun stuff which a business
doesn't actually need, possibly already cover in house or should be paying a
professional to do.

Actually SEO:

 _Keyword research + targeting_ \- SEO

 _On-page optimization_ \- SEO.

 _Making the site search-engine friendly_ \- SEO.

 _XML Sitemaps_ \- SEO.

 _Alternative search listings_ \- SEO

Not SEO:

 _The business' overall product, marketing and sales strategy and where SEO
makes the most sense._ \- This is marketing. Nothing to do with SEO at all.
The last phrase does, but it's pretty obvious where. Hint, hint. On the
website.

 _Funnel optimization_ \- UX. While it might have an effect on SEO, it is not
something an SEO should be touching.

 _Testing + optimizing content for users_ \- UX. Nothing to do with SEO.

 _Content strategy_ \- Marketing. Nothing to do with SEO.

 _Analytics_ \- Not SEO. It can measure the effect of SEO, but isn't SEO.

 _Usability + user experience issues_ \- UX. Definitely not SEO.

 _Reputation tracking + management_ \- PR. Definitely not SEO.

 _Competitive research_ \- Management consultancy, should be handled
internally by small business at a director level. Definitely not SEO.

 _Social media marketing_ \- PR/Marketing. Not SEO. Pretty big clue in the
name there, with it ending with marketing.

 _Syndication, scraping, copyright and duplicate content issues_ \- Legal. Not
SEO. Unless it starts ranking higher than your sites.

I wouldn't mind having someone do the second list for me. But it's still not
SEO.

~~~
Isofarro
With the rather strict definition of SEO you seem to hold, and a very high-
level definition of concepts, your above comments make sense. Yet, in
practice, SEOers get involved in a larger number of areas than just figuring
out how to optimise organic search, they get involved in the general role of
getting more targetted visitors to the site, so pure technical search engine
blackbox testing is one skill in their toolbox.

They get involved in the AdSense part of search engines, where changes in
advertising wording affect the number of people clicking on that ad. A
marketing department most likely wouldn't be able to come anywhere near an SEO
who knows what audiences are searching for and the material on their site that
matches that criteria. The flexibility and quick reaction times here, a decent
SEO will outscore a "big campaign" focused marketing department.

So funnel optimisation then can be on the remit of an SEO - the funnel between
the website, and the conversion goal (getting the right people from a search
engine results page to the right piece of content. The route is an essential
part of it - do people get there directly, or via an intermediate page - will
marketers have sufficient technical knowledge and understanding of searching
patterns to make a good decision?)

So in terms of funnel optimisation, of course, testing and optimising content
that people see to increase conversion rates - it makes a great deal of sense
to have an SEO involved.

Analytics - yes, it's the tool that measures the effect of SEO. But who is
going to set that up accurately? Whose going to know what beacons/shims are
needed where to be able to measure the effectiveness of their work? If anyone,
SEO are quite the right group of people to ensure that beacons are in the
right places, and remain in the right place, adjusting, correcting and
improving as the site and it's traffic grows. I don't see a marketer, a web
developer or an engineer having the inclination or dedication to keeping that
running optimally.

Content strategy - do you really want product reference and howto guides in
the hands of marketers? Seriously? Sure, for a brochureware site right before
the signup, I guess marketers should be substantially involved here. But the
support material? SEOers are well placed to connect the right support material
with the people looking for it.

Reputation tracking - I'm not convinced this is entirely in the remit of PR -
they are likely to ignore a handful of complaints in tweets in favour of the
bigger picture. Best get a customer servicing person involved. And a couple of
well thought out tweets and conversations from a knowledgeable SEO wouldn't go
amiss either.

Competitive research - again, at such a high level fine, pay some consultant.
At the "why is their website doing better than mine" an SEO will outdo a
marketing consultant any day.

Social media marketing - again, you're focusing at a far to high level.
PR/Marketing aren't the right people to tackle customer servicing issues that
surface in social media conversations. And talking to the listening audience
on Facebook and Twitter - the key is to do it with a human voice, not a
PR/Marketing filtered voice.

Syndication - Legal? On a high-level approach on contracts/agreements between
organisations for syndicating content (like AP news items), yes you should
involve someone from legal. But tweaking your RSS feed?

duplicate content issues - I'd be very impressed if there was anyone working
in a legal department on legal matters who could explain where there were
duplicate content issues on their employer's site and recommend a good way of
correcting / addressing that. My long experience of lawyers is that they
believe deep linking is a breach of copyright.

You're focusing on a too high-level definition of these various aspects of
running a website. An SEO is a very handy person to have around in the
trenches. Whereas at the high level you are considering this, what PR,
Marketing and Legal provide is close to useless on a day-to-day basis.

An SEO person is invaluable at the very granular level, the day-to-day issues
that make a website work. PR, Marketing and Legal aren't good at working at
such a fine-grained level.

------
tomjen3
This convinced me of the opposite actually. All his examples were something
that people would love to blog about, except his hair medicine which he used
as an example of something that is overrun by spam.

Get something to rank for Viagra or a penis pump using only white hat tactics,
outline a good plan for doing so or conceded the point.

------
DanielBMarkham
SEO (marketing) is critical to anybody out there who wants to find people.

Don't piss Google off. (Which means don't piss the searchers off)

I don't think there's much more to it than that. Maybe so, but from where I
sit the problem is that "don't piss Google off" can mean pretty well damn much
anything, so once you start picking it apart it's not logical or self-
consistent. That probably means that continued analysis is a waste of time.
After all, if you standardize how to market, you've destroyed the entire
concept of marketing.

There are huge opposing forces at work here. I think the little guy does best
by simply doing things that he would be happy to have made public -- and
that's "public" as in normal people reading it, not "public" as in stuff that
appeals to hackers. Different thing entirely.

------
powertower
It seemed like the point he was trying to make is that:

White Hat SEO, when defined as traffic generation and link building using
forums, blogs, social, etc... "works."

Skip the text all the way to the last image. The point is made there.

------
hansseo
If your niche was synchronous swimming albino eels, then you probably didn't
need any SEO. IF your niche was Chicago real estate. You'd better get your SEO
game on.

------
franze
SEO is a business. every - real - SEO action has

\- an (implementation) cost

\- a measurable impact

\- a risk.

categorizing it into "ethical" categories does not change how it is practiced
or what works.

or to put it in the spirit of the headline: f$#ck .* hat.

------
tomx
Is anyone else annoyed by the term 'white hat'? It almost inevitably means
there will be a repetitive and subjective discussion of "white v black hat"
techniques...

------
leon_
SEO on HN: It's F$#ing Annoying

~~~
a5seo
If people on HN care about cost effective ways to build traffic, there are few
better options than SEO.

Have no money for marketing but have a great app, useful content, and a
creative flair for promoting it? Then look at SEO.

And that starts by understanding the SEO means: a) how usable your site is for
bots, and b) how you can attract links to it.

If SEO doesn't make sense for your business, ignore it the same way I ignore
posts about Haskell and Lisp. I have nothing against them, that's just not my
platform.

------
hippich
any type of seo trying to artificially put some site higher in serps. so be
honest - there is no honest and not-honest seo techniques. maybe not-honest
and not so not-honest...

~~~
patio11
All sites rank "artificially", since search engines are incapable of measuring
quality or relevance to a searcher's intent and instead rely on proxy signals
like links and similarity to keywords on a page or in a link graph. Good SEO
concentrates both on making sure that your content creation does not interact
poorly with the 100%-guaranteed-to-be-artificial way that search engines
perceive your website, and on strategic issues in shaping how you create and
communicate value in such a way that it will actually be found by people. For
example, if you routinely create long essays with metaphorical titles, you
need to be told by your SEO guy that search engines don't do metaphors well
and searchers don't typically look for them, so they need to be retitled to be
more fact- or benefit-oriented. (This is a lesson that the traditional media
learned, and it required absolute bloodletting in the newsrooms to get it
across: "Studio Flutters As Swan Soars" used to be newspaper best practice,
for web writing it is now "Strong Black Swan Opening Weekend Did Not Help
Studio Stock Price.")

More broadly, this attitude is like the reflexive engineer distrust of
marketing, believing that product quality excuses all sins. It doesn't. If
your product sounds scary to a user, and she avoids trying it because of that,
you fail to create value for her. You need to communicate that your product is
not scary. If that requires a photo of a woman with a headset then it is your
_duty to your customer_ to put that same woman with a headset stock photo that
everyone uses so that she feels comfortable enough to experience the life-
changing benefits your product has to offer.

