Quick comments on WebmasterWorld
Firstly, it's important to point out that I went down to the WWSC without the foggiest idea what it would be about (SEO Roundtable has some good coverage of all the talks).
This conference seemed to be primarily concerned with search engine optimization ("SEO"), which is the practice of making changes to one's web site to get it to rank higher on search engines like Google or Yahoo!.
Within the SEO world, there seem to be two kinds of players:
It's obvious why someone would want to engage in "White Hat SEO" to drive traffic to their own site, but it wasn't obvious to me why someone would work so hard to drive traffic to a site that didn't sell anything or have any real content.
Well, there's a very good reason to drive traffic to a site that is just a bunch of links and fake articles: to get users to click on to somewhere else. Google AdSense is a major driver of "Black Hat SEO", but even more money can be made linking to mortgage companies, porn sites, and casinos. An online casino like 888.com or Golden Palace will pay up to $300 per new user registered. Doesn't take many of those to pay the rent.
The problem with all this "Black Hat SEO" is, of course, that it leads to less accurate search results for everyone else because these people are constantly trying to get the top spots on Yahoo! and Google whether they "deserve" them or not.
This conference seemed to be primarily concerned with search engine optimization ("SEO"), which is the practice of making changes to one's web site to get it to rank higher on search engines like Google or Yahoo!.
Within the SEO world, there seem to be two kinds of players:
- White Hat SEO - this is a person or company that works to get its site to rank more highly in search engines to serve some legitimate purpose. For example, a site about Java programming might use "White Hat SEO" to get its pages to come up higher in searches for terms related to Java programming. Although this site might run ads, the primary purpose is to bring users to the site so they can buy or read something on the site being linked to. Amazon.com would be a good example of a company that uses "White Hat SEO" tactics to get a higher ranking on search engines for terms related to products it sells.
- Black Hat SEO - this is a person or company that works to get its site to rank more highly in search engines without any legitimate purpose to help users or to sell something directly. These "Black Hat SEO"s use every trick in the book (link farms, cloaking pages, registering thousands of domains, having people in India write fake "articles" to put on the site, etc.) to get highly ranked for terms like "poker" or "mortgage". As one conference attendee put it: "I'm interested in PPC - Porn, Pills, and Casinos".
It's obvious why someone would want to engage in "White Hat SEO" to drive traffic to their own site, but it wasn't obvious to me why someone would work so hard to drive traffic to a site that didn't sell anything or have any real content.
Well, there's a very good reason to drive traffic to a site that is just a bunch of links and fake articles: to get users to click on to somewhere else. Google AdSense is a major driver of "Black Hat SEO", but even more money can be made linking to mortgage companies, porn sites, and casinos. An online casino like 888.com or Golden Palace will pay up to $300 per new user registered. Doesn't take many of those to pay the rent.
The problem with all this "Black Hat SEO" is, of course, that it leads to less accurate search results for everyone else because these people are constantly trying to get the top spots on Yahoo! and Google whether they "deserve" them or not.
2 Comments:
Hi Jack,
do you know about some really usefull article about SEO + tutorial ;-) ?
thx
tomas
First thing to do would be to read the coverage of the conference I attended - many of the talks are summarized there. You can search Google for the names of the speakers - many of them have sites or blogs that go into SEO issues.
Then, get a subscription to webmasterworld.com. This is where all the SEO guys post to the forums. It's a little expensive ($89.00 for six months), but if you're seriously interested in SEO, it should be worth it.
Post a Comment
<< Home