As in the ‘Western’ cowboy movies of old,black and white hat tactics

Just like the movies…

As in the ‘Western’ cowboy movies of old, the concept of black and white hat
tactics is supposed to differentiate between the good guys and the bad.

However, it is important to understand who it is that defines those who are
the good guys wearing the white hats and the baddies who wear the black.

The first and perhaps most important point to make about those who use
black hat tactics is that they are not doing anything that is illegal (at least,
the majority of them are not) and in most cases, the tactics they adopt to
make sure that their website features well in the search engine results are
not even unethical.

However, the search engines have rules about what they deem to be
acceptable promotional and marketing practices, and they deem anything
that falls outside those rules to be black hat. In other words, those who are
using black hat tactics are not necessarily doing anything wrong, it is just
that they are breaking or bending the rules that are imposed on the way
that they use the internet by Google or Yahoo!.

It is therefore reasonable to ask a few questions here.

First, why do the mega-rich corporations like Google or Yahoo! believe that
they have any right to impose rules on other internet users? They do not
own the internet, although behavior such as imposing rules might suggest
that they believe otherwise.

Secondly, who are these rules that are fairly arbitrarily created by the search
engine overlords designed to benefit?

Of course, the search engine people will proclaim that they impose these
rules to protect their users, and to ensure that they enjoy a high quality
experience whenever they use that particular search engine.

There is some truth in this, because the quality of the results that the search
engines return has definitely been improving over the past couple of years.

That being said, however, there is no doubt that the major beneficiaries of
this imposition of rules and regulations have been the owners and
shareholders of sites like Google and Yahoo!

For this reason, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with applying black hat
tactics to the site optimization process, although it is, of course, up to each
individual site owner to decide what is acceptable to them and what is not.

As intimated earlier, there are some serious black hat experts whose
practices and behavior do border on the illegal, but this book is not
concerned with those sorts of tactics, simply because they are way too
dangerous for any black hat beginner to get involved in.