“White Hat” vs “Black Hat” Search and Marketing

Are you a “white hat” marketer or a “black hat” marketer? Do you even know what these terms mean?

For the most part, I consider myself in the white hat camp. With maybe a touch of grey around the temples, now and then.

For example, I make more than half of my online income these days with information sites monetized by AdSense ads. My sites are pure white hat, with real content that is intended and written to stand alone (and attract search traffic) based on its value to the reader. I’ve looked at automated mass building of pseudo information sites, via scraping and spinning technologies, and long ago recognized that there is no genuine business value or sustainability in that approach.

The grey enters the picture in the methods I use to create traffic to my info sites, via blog and mini-net linking. There’s nothing in my approach that involves “gaming” the search engines, but some purists might say I’ve crossed a line by creating multiple sites with related content, and aggressively interlinking them.

Every online marketer and entrepeneur needs to think carefully about their hat color. I’ve just been reading an interesting discussion of the issue as it relates to search optimization: white vs. black; content vs. technical loopholes; attracting links vs. linking schemes; creating a valuable resource vs. chasing algorithms; learning how search engines work vs. exploiting them.

It’s a good read, especially if you aren’t really sure what color hat you should be wearing.