Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Shades of SEO

We usually talk about either black hat (evil) or white hat (honorable) Search Engine Optimizers, but Yahoo’s Tim Converse adds a couple of new shades to the mix:

1. Dark Inky Black Hat SEO: So evil he’s a typosquatter installing spyware. Plain illegal, too.
2. Charcoal Hat SEO: Optimizes really unrelated pages for all kinds of queries, but within the bounds of legality.
3. Dark Gray Hat SEO: This SEO is e.g. a splogger stealing content from other sites. (What, that’s better than charcoal?)
4. Slate Gray Hat SEO: An SEO creating link farms and such.
5. Gray Hat SEO: An SEO who actually reads the search engine’s webmaster guidelines, but then tries as much “evil” as she can get away with.
6. Light Gray Hat SEO: This SEO creates original content (lots of it), but the content is still only aimed at search engines.
7. Off-White Hat SEO: This guy not only ensures the site is indexable – he’ll also make sure to get lots of backlinks from friends.
8. White Hat SEO: This person puts up the content that people are actually searching for, and prepares the site to make it very accessible. White Hat SEOs only optimize those of their pages they deem worthy to be ranking top in search engines.
9. Luminescent Pearly White Hat SEO: Not only does this SEO do everything the White Hat SEO does, the LPW Hat SEO also makes sure pages will not show up for irrelevant queries.

[Via Search Engine Watch.]

Shades of SEO by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (9)

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