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| SEO: Gray Hat SEO - Is It Real And Should You Do It? (SiteProNews) |
This Gray Hat SEO tips and tricks, sounds very interesting. I'm sure you would find it very useful.
Also Read: SEO: The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet 2.0 (Moz)
Since the advent of SEO, like any human-created system, many have found it challenging to play by the ethical rules. Thus, “black hat” and “white hat” SEO were born. Black hat refers to shady practices where businesses buy links and engage in bot-scamming techniques, and white hat are all those standardized practices that develop increased rankings the old-fashioned way: by earning it.
It’s a natural progression, then, that the ever-present desire to bend the rules as far as they can go without breaking would manifest a new SEO term, “gray hat.” Many argue it’s the best search engine game in town, while others say it doesn’t even exist – there is no gray.
What exactly is gray hat SEO, and should your business consider pushing these boundaries? That all depends on your risk tolerance, adherence to structure, and willingness to walk the line between integrity and unethical practices. Read on to see where you land in the mix.
Gray Hat SEO: A Definition
Consider gray hat practices akin to a newly developed street drug – there’s a period of time where those in the know can use it before it’s deemed illegal. To some, these tactics are legitimate – crafty ways to play within the system, and come out on top.
In truth, gray hat is just a nicer way to say you’re attempting to cheat the process, without looking like it. To illustrate this point, let’s examine the most common gray hat practices.
Gray Hat in Action – Popular Tactics
Domain Purchases: Some businesses do a grab-and-buy on old yet authoritative URLs that can then add backlinks to the sites they own, thereby boosting rankings. While this may seem like an out of pocket expense, it can cost far less than the time and effort it normally takes to build your link juice.
Social Media Buys: Looking to increase your social media numbers overnight? There are services that automate this process, but proceed with caution: Twitter, at least, isn’t allowing these inflations any longer, and other platforms may soon follow suit.
Content Manipulation: Many now use software that scans the web for content on a particular topic, then “spins” it by rewording sections, thereby avoiding a duplicate content ding. Copyright infringement is still a possibility since normally no original content is added, but it can whiz past Panda’s watchful eye.
Cloaking: Famous in black hat circles, cloaking is an attempt to tell search engines one thing, and users another. By manipulating meta-data and IP addresses, you can convince search engines to crawl you when they otherwise would not, based on your content. Some argue this is a legitimate “gray area” for communities and membership sites.
Keyword Page Strategies: Another middle of the road tampering that involves creating landing pages for each keyword or keyword phrase. This can be time consuming, but certainly effective; as long as releases are staggered over time, so as to avoid spam filters.
Google-Bombing: A technique involving the formation of a big dose of links, generated solely for rankings. When combined with keyword bombing, this can inflate rankings in short order.
CSS Content Deception: Those with the coding chops can fool search engine bots into thinking a site’s content appears farther down the page than it actually does. The benefit? Google crawls content first, and if it’s perceived to be significantly down the page, the site can read as having increased value.
Microsites: Similar to keyword pages, some businesses create a different mini-website for each category they cover. As an example, a business selling pet supplies may create separate sites for cats, dogs, exotics, birds, etc. This is easy for search engines to sniff out, however; especially if you’re using the same contact information for each site.
Should You Consider Bending The Rules?
The argument for following standardized practices is always this: the bad guys seem to finish first. But is that really the case? And are there any exceptions?
Yes, it’s true that those that engage in questionable SEO tactics often seem to hit the top of the rankings. Monitor these results long term, however, and you’re likely to see cracks in the armor. Google, Bing, and Yahoo have an incredibly vested interested in catching deceptions as fast as they can, and years of algorithm shifts have shown they’re definitely paying attention. If you want your business to have staying power, it’s advisable that you not make the big dogs angry, or you may have to start from square one.
That said, some industries are themselves deviant and renegades, and in order to compete, you may feel like you have no choice.
In the SEOChat forums, one user, named Cygnus, puts it this way:
“I’m a white hat for some sites and a grey/black for others…trying to be a white hat in an uber-competitive industry doesn’t make sense with the current SEO environment. I can’t imagine someone trying to take on the phrase “viagra” with a pure white-hat approach…they probably wouldn’t crack the top 30.”
The Myth Of White And Gray
In actuality, “gray hat SEO” is only a matter of perception. One person’s gray is another person’s pitch black. It’s really only a category created to make those breaking the rules feel better about their strategies.
That said, anyone attempting to only follow white hat SEO practices has an almost impossible task. Because Google defines black hat as any attempt to manipulate rankings, you’d be hard pressed to find a site that hasn’t crossed the line. We bribe sites to link to us by offering link juice in return. We study keyword density for content and do our best to make search engine bots take notice. The list goes on and on.
Because the world knows that SEO is a critical component to online success, it’s natural that folks do all they can to get their business on top. The game, therefore, becomes one of risk tolerance and ethics. Only you, the business owner, can decide where in the spectrum of black, gray, and white you choose to land. No matter how you choose, there are repercussions – and you have to be comfortable with potential outcomes before moving forward with your strategies.
There is no guarantee that white or black hat, or any shade thereof, will help you win the race.
Where do you land in the spectrum of SEO? Do you think gray hat SEO is a legitimate classification of strategies?
Since the advent of SEO, like any human-created system, many have found it challenging to play by the ethical rules. Thus, “black hat” and “white hat” SEO were born. Black hat refers to shady practices where businesses buy links and engage in bot-scamming techniques, and white hat are all those standardized practices that develop increased rankings the old-fashioned way: by earning it.
It’s a natural progression, then, that the ever-present desire to bend the rules as far as they can go without breaking would manifest a new SEO term, “gray hat.” Many argue it’s the best search engine game in town, while others say it doesn’t even exist – there is no gray.
What exactly is gray hat SEO, and should your business consider pushing these boundaries? That all depends on your risk tolerance, adherence to structure, and willingness to walk the line between integrity and unethical practices. Read on to see where you land in the mix.
Gray Hat SEO: A Definition
Consider gray hat practices akin to a newly developed street drug – there’s a period of time where those in the know can use it before it’s deemed illegal. To some, these tactics are legitimate – crafty ways to play within the system, and come out on top.
In truth, gray hat is just a nicer way to say you’re attempting to cheat the process, without looking like it. To illustrate this point, let’s examine the most common gray hat practices.
Gray Hat in Action – Popular Tactics
Domain Purchases: Some businesses do a grab-and-buy on old yet authoritative URLs that can then add backlinks to the sites they own, thereby boosting rankings. While this may seem like an out of pocket expense, it can cost far less than the time and effort it normally takes to build your link juice.
Social Media Buys: Looking to increase your social media numbers overnight? There are services that automate this process, but proceed with caution: Twitter, at least, isn’t allowing these inflations any longer, and other platforms may soon follow suit.
Content Manipulation: Many now use software that scans the web for content on a particular topic, then “spins” it by rewording sections, thereby avoiding a duplicate content ding. Copyright infringement is still a possibility since normally no original content is added, but it can whiz past Panda’s watchful eye.
Cloaking: Famous in black hat circles, cloaking is an attempt to tell search engines one thing, and users another. By manipulating meta-data and IP addresses, you can convince search engines to crawl you when they otherwise would not, based on your content. Some argue this is a legitimate “gray area” for communities and membership sites.
Keyword Page Strategies: Another middle of the road tampering that involves creating landing pages for each keyword or keyword phrase. This can be time consuming, but certainly effective; as long as releases are staggered over time, so as to avoid spam filters.
Google-Bombing: A technique involving the formation of a big dose of links, generated solely for rankings. When combined with keyword bombing, this can inflate rankings in short order.
CSS Content Deception: Those with the coding chops can fool search engine bots into thinking a site’s content appears farther down the page than it actually does. The benefit? Google crawls content first, and if it’s perceived to be significantly down the page, the site can read as having increased value.
Microsites: Similar to keyword pages, some businesses create a different mini-website for each category they cover. As an example, a business selling pet supplies may create separate sites for cats, dogs, exotics, birds, etc. This is easy for search engines to sniff out, however; especially if you’re using the same contact information for each site.
Should You Consider Bending The Rules?
The argument for following standardized practices is always this: the bad guys seem to finish first. But is that really the case? And are there any exceptions?
Yes, it’s true that those that engage in questionable SEO tactics often seem to hit the top of the rankings. Monitor these results long term, however, and you’re likely to see cracks in the armor. Google, Bing, and Yahoo have an incredibly vested interested in catching deceptions as fast as they can, and years of algorithm shifts have shown they’re definitely paying attention. If you want your business to have staying power, it’s advisable that you not make the big dogs angry, or you may have to start from square one.
That said, some industries are themselves deviant and renegades, and in order to compete, you may feel like you have no choice.
In the SEOChat forums, one user, named Cygnus, puts it this way:
“I’m a white hat for some sites and a grey/black for others…trying to be a white hat in an uber-competitive industry doesn’t make sense with the current SEO environment. I can’t imagine someone trying to take on the phrase “viagra” with a pure white-hat approach…they probably wouldn’t crack the top 30.”
The Myth Of White And Gray
In actuality, “gray hat SEO” is only a matter of perception. One person’s gray is another person’s pitch black. It’s really only a category created to make those breaking the rules feel better about their strategies.
That said, anyone attempting to only follow white hat SEO practices has an almost impossible task. Because Google defines black hat as any attempt to manipulate rankings, you’d be hard pressed to find a site that hasn’t crossed the line. We bribe sites to link to us by offering link juice in return. We study keyword density for content and do our best to make search engine bots take notice. The list goes on and on.
Because the world knows that SEO is a critical component to online success, it’s natural that folks do all they can to get their business on top. The game, therefore, becomes one of risk tolerance and ethics. Only you, the business owner, can decide where in the spectrum of black, gray, and white you choose to land. No matter how you choose, there are repercussions – and you have to be comfortable with potential outcomes before moving forward with your strategies.
There is no guarantee that white or black hat, or any shade thereof, will help you win the race.
Where do you land in the spectrum of SEO? Do you think gray hat SEO is a legitimate classification of strategies?
Post Credits
Post Site: http://www.sitepronews.com/
Post Arthur: Tina Courtney
Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/oshgumishy
Follow on Google Plus: Tina Courtney
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| Social Media: Facebook Embeddable Posts: Great News for Site Owners (SiteProNews) |
Recently Twitter experimented with its new feature the editorialized tweets, now its Facebook embeddable post. I'm sure a lot of people don't know what Facebook Embeddable Posts mean. You will know all that by the time you finish reading this post on embeddable post. Social media features gets better and better.
Facebook has made another step that follows in the footsteps of Twitter and Instagram. After recently implementing hashtags that organize statuses for discovery outside of a page, Facebook has now made their posts embeddable.
What Exactly Does This Mean?
If you have a website or blog, you can now link to Facebook posts, pictures, videos and other content, and the Facebook content will be connected with your site. In the past, there were ways to embed Facebook posts to your site, but they were messy and typically involved using a third-party tool.
By making this important update, Facebook makes it monumentally easier for a broad range of users to embed posts, since the feature will be built into Facebook – eliminating the need for these third party tools. While this feature is great for bloggers and site-owners, it will also help increase Facebook’s traffic as well!
Right now, there are only a handful of sites allowed to use the Facebook embed feature. These include Mashable, People, Huffington Post, CNN and Bleacher Report. But Facebook plans to roll the feature out for everyone sometime soon. This feature could be extremely beneficial for businesses that want to create a web presence or who want to simplify their Internet marketing campaigns.
How It Works
Once the feature is enabled for every Facebook user, there will be an “Embed Post” category from the menu. This category will be listed where the “Report/Mark as Spam” currently is right now. After you click on the “Embed Post” link, you’ll be able to copy and paste a piece of code which you can put directly onto your website.
The string of code will embed the post directly to your website, and it will look exactly as it appears on Facebook. If you want more of an explanation, CNN explains the feature using some pictures.
Another perk is that once the post is embedded, users can comment, like, and find hashtagged content just like they would inside the actual Facebook platform. This offers a number of benefits for companies in terms of increased engagement and efficiency of their websites:
Everything will be connected. By connecting your social media account and your website, everything can be in one place. It may make it easier for visitors to navigate, follow conversations and engage with content, because they won’t have to go back and forth between two places. Your website will appear modernized and efficient to your users!
You’ll have more opportunities to be “heard.” If you have content embedded in multiple places, more people can see your conversations. For instance, a fellow blogger may never have seen the conversations sparked by your Facebook posts, but now they can and may even begin participating as well. You can develop a wider audience range. While it may be uncommon, there are people without social media accounts. So in the past, users who only visited your website could never see your Facebook posts if they didn’t have an account. And users who only “liked” you on Facebook may never have visited your actual website or blog. The embed feature clearly changes this and enhances the user experience for every type of visitor.
Make Sure It’s Public
The only drawback to the new embed feature – which shouldn’t affect most businesses – is that the post you want to embed has to be public.
For most businesses, your page is probably already public; however, if you have a mixture of public and private posts – posts only “friends” can see – you might want to consider making all of your posts public.
This will allow you to embed anything you post on Facebook to your website, which may attract an even larger pool of users.
Exciting Ways You Can Use The Feature
Facebook’s embed feature is offering exciting possibilities from the beginning; although, in time, users will be able to find even more creative ways to link their website and Facebook account!
Once the embed feature is rolled out for everyone, here are some ways you can use it:
Put out better content. If you allow your content to be embedded, it’ll be more likely that newsmakers, such as journalists and bloggers, will come to you looking for fresh content. This should be an incentive for all business, since high-quality content can lead to new opportunities for publicity!
Increase publicity for contests and promotions.
What Exactly Does This Mean?
If you have a website or blog, you can now link to Facebook posts, pictures, videos and other content, and the Facebook content will be connected with your site. In the past, there were ways to embed Facebook posts to your site, but they were messy and typically involved using a third-party tool.
By making this important update, Facebook makes it monumentally easier for a broad range of users to embed posts, since the feature will be built into Facebook – eliminating the need for these third party tools. While this feature is great for bloggers and site-owners, it will also help increase Facebook’s traffic as well!
Right now, there are only a handful of sites allowed to use the Facebook embed feature. These include Mashable, People, Huffington Post, CNN and Bleacher Report. But Facebook plans to roll the feature out for everyone sometime soon. This feature could be extremely beneficial for businesses that want to create a web presence or who want to simplify their Internet marketing campaigns.
How It Works
Once the feature is enabled for every Facebook user, there will be an “Embed Post” category from the menu. This category will be listed where the “Report/Mark as Spam” currently is right now. After you click on the “Embed Post” link, you’ll be able to copy and paste a piece of code which you can put directly onto your website.
The string of code will embed the post directly to your website, and it will look exactly as it appears on Facebook. If you want more of an explanation, CNN explains the feature using some pictures.
Another perk is that once the post is embedded, users can comment, like, and find hashtagged content just like they would inside the actual Facebook platform. This offers a number of benefits for companies in terms of increased engagement and efficiency of their websites:
Everything will be connected. By connecting your social media account and your website, everything can be in one place. It may make it easier for visitors to navigate, follow conversations and engage with content, because they won’t have to go back and forth between two places. Your website will appear modernized and efficient to your users!
You’ll have more opportunities to be “heard.” If you have content embedded in multiple places, more people can see your conversations. For instance, a fellow blogger may never have seen the conversations sparked by your Facebook posts, but now they can and may even begin participating as well. You can develop a wider audience range. While it may be uncommon, there are people without social media accounts. So in the past, users who only visited your website could never see your Facebook posts if they didn’t have an account. And users who only “liked” you on Facebook may never have visited your actual website or blog. The embed feature clearly changes this and enhances the user experience for every type of visitor.
Make Sure It’s Public
The only drawback to the new embed feature – which shouldn’t affect most businesses – is that the post you want to embed has to be public.
For most businesses, your page is probably already public; however, if you have a mixture of public and private posts – posts only “friends” can see – you might want to consider making all of your posts public.
This will allow you to embed anything you post on Facebook to your website, which may attract an even larger pool of users.
Exciting Ways You Can Use The Feature
Facebook’s embed feature is offering exciting possibilities from the beginning; although, in time, users will be able to find even more creative ways to link their website and Facebook account!
Once the embed feature is rolled out for everyone, here are some ways you can use it:
Put out better content. If you allow your content to be embedded, it’ll be more likely that newsmakers, such as journalists and bloggers, will come to you looking for fresh content. This should be an incentive for all business, since high-quality content can lead to new opportunities for publicity!
Increase publicity for contests and promotions.
If you frequently hold contests on Facebook to engage with users, embedding these contest posts onto your website can help even more visitors see it! This may increase involvement, and since users can still “like” and comment on the post when it’s embedded, it will be a great way to generate conversation and excitement about the contest or promotion. Spark quality commentary. Since Facebook also recently introduced their “hashtags,” the new embed feature will help Facebook become a place for news and commentary, especially since it will be easier than ever for users to participate in conversations on posts.
Overall, Facebook’s embed feature can improve the connection between your social media account and your website or blog. You can enhance your users’ experiences, while simplifying them at the same time.
The feature should also encourage you to begin releasing better, high-quality content. Newsmakers will probably begin publishing more on Facebook because of the feature, in hopes that their content will be embedded and increase their influence.
This tactic can help your business’s Facebook page in the same way. You’re not the only one who can embed your Facebook posts; try encouraging your customers and visitors to embed your posts and photos on their own sites or blogs. The possibilities are endless, so keep your eyes peeled for the moment Facebook releases the embed tool to everyone and give it a whirl!
Overall, Facebook’s embed feature can improve the connection between your social media account and your website or blog. You can enhance your users’ experiences, while simplifying them at the same time.
The feature should also encourage you to begin releasing better, high-quality content. Newsmakers will probably begin publishing more on Facebook because of the feature, in hopes that their content will be embedded and increase their influence.
This tactic can help your business’s Facebook page in the same way. You’re not the only one who can embed your Facebook posts; try encouraging your customers and visitors to embed your posts and photos on their own sites or blogs. The possibilities are endless, so keep your eyes peeled for the moment Facebook releases the embed tool to everyone and give it a whirl!
Post Credits
Post Site: http://www.sitepronews.com
Post Arthur: Adrienne Erin
Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/adrienneerin
