Ho John Lee's Weblog

via Seomoz:

This week’s Newsweek (December 12, 2005) features an article on white hat vs black hat search engine optimization. Among other things, it’s interesting that the topic has made it into the mainstream media.

A “black hat” anecdote:

Using an illicit software program he downloaded from the Net, he forcibly injected a link to his own private-detectives referral site onto the site of Long Island’s Stony Brook University. Most search engines give a higher value to a link on a reputable university site.

The site in question appears to be “www.private-detectives.org”, still currently #1 at MSN and #4 at Yahoo for searches on “private detectives”. It appears to have been sandboxed on Google.

Another interesting post at Seomoz features comments from “randfish” and “EarlGrey”, the two SEO consultants interviewed by Newsweek on the merits of “White Hat” vs “Black Hat” search engine optimization, and gives further perspective on the motivation and outlook of the two approaches.

In some ways one can think of the difference between search engine optimization approaches as a “trading” approach vs a “building” approach to investment. The “Black Hat” approach articulated in the Seomoz article tends to focus purely on a tactical present cash return to the operator, while the “White Hat” approach presumes that the operator will realize ongoing future value by developing a useful information asset and making it visible to the search engines. This makes an implicit assumption that the site itself offers some unique and valuable information content, which can’t usually be the case in the long run.

From an information retrieval point of view, I’m obviously in the latter camp of thinking that identifying the most relevant results for the search user is a good thing. However, the black hat approach makes perfect sense if you consider it in terms of optimizing the short term value return to the publisher (cash as information), while possibly still presenting a useable information return to the search user. This is especially the case for commodity information or products, in which the actual information or goods are identical, such as affiliate sales.

I’m a little curious about the link from Stony Brook University. I took a quick look but wasn’t able to turn up a backlink. One of the problems with simply relying on trusted link sources is that they can be gamed, corrupted, or hacked.

See also: A reading list on PageRank and search algorithms

Update 12-12-2005 00:30 PST: Lots of comments on Matt Cutt’s post, plus Slashdot