In order to see how these two sides potentially go about their business, let’s give a top black hat and a top white hat the same challenge. What if we gave each pro a simple website (same industry and page count) to optimize and market? The winner would have the most backlinks and traffic for their respective sites.

The black hat would autosubmit their site links to bulletin board systems, catalogues, forums, and guestbooks, receiving loads of traffic and backlinks. This strategy would be almost guaranteed to work but only for a week, if that, until Google figures it out and places the black hat’s domain in permanent solitary confinement. The white hat would bookmark, network, create content and submit to the social news sites, possibly breaking through on Digg receiving 100,000 hits in a twenty-four hour period. Each strategy would work well but it’s most likely that the black hat would walk home victorious at the week’s end. However, if we’re measuring success via staying power within the search engine indexes, the white hat would be the victor.

Many of us perceive black hat to be evil because of the ominous name and because black hat tactics usually aim to compromise the integrity of online properties for personal gain, an obvious moral disincentive. But is it really evil?

Your decision to stay within the white pastures or go hunting in the black forests boils down to a moral and social decision. If you’re a good white hat, over time you’ll build a solid reputation. You’ll be respected in the community and have various companies knocking on your door requesting your services. Hopefully you’re adding valuable or interesting content to the internet. Even though your efforts are propelled by a paying client, your content is still good, interesting, educational, and respected. Over time you’ll make good money and you may establish yourself as an industry expert.

If you’re a good black hat you’re pumping sites and making a quick dollar. You’re in it for the cash and you could care less if catzforum.com is having serious spam problems. You’re in it to buck the system and you feel that Google is blacker than the blackest of hats. You’re not doing it to build a reputation; you’re doing it to buy that lovely beach house in Monaco and the rare Aston Martin you’ve always wanted.

So…who are you? Black hat, white, or maybe a bit of both?

Industry References:
SEO Black Hat Brain vs. White Hat Brain
My boss is obsessed with Black Hat SEO
White Hat Vs. Black Hat

For some reason ‘Mongolian Invader’ is number four over at Google Trends. I say “for some reason” because the the news articles that accompany this search query (that being one single news reference since June 16th) is a spammy site. Could it be that someone is repetitively searching the keyword ‘Mongolian Invader’ to game Google Trends and gain traffic? Interesting bit of manipulation if this is the case.

Go to Google and query celebrate express coupon. Do you see the URL www.happycoupons.com? Here’s what I’m seeing for these guys…

In Firefox:
Yesterday they had two listings at positions 3 and 4, one was for the www.happycoupons.com homepage and the other was for http://www.happycoupons.com/coupons/celebrate_express/. The homepage URL is redirecting to the celebrate express URL. Today, they only have one listing which is the homepage URL which is still redirecting to the celebrate express URL.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

When I login to Google and hover over the www.happycoupons.com URL in the SERPs…instead of seeing www.happycoupons.com show-up in the bottom of my Firefox browser, I see this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.happycou
pons.com%2F&ei=TWPhRpbFJY66esXojd0M&usg=AFQjCNHnoKSMuCUpz0Z0UPkjS
LFJzLOGrg&sig2=GsEVur_0ca4jLP3bfpZ8YQ

But I only see this after logging in.

In Internet Explorer:
To make things even weirder, when I do the search in Internet Explorer, I still see the two listings for www.happycoupons.com as I did yesterday in Firefox.

BTW: The homepage URL redirect is only happening in the SERPs when you google ‘celebrate express coupon’. If you type in the homepage directly, there is no redirect.

Can someone tell me what the hell is going on here?