I always enjoy ranting about the dangers of black hat SEO. Gray hat SEO too, for that matter. But what I enjoy most is the challenge of disecting sites that are using black or grey hat SEO techniques (Fresh Pair, for example) and peeling away the layers of the onion. I feel like a detective... like Robert Langdon (from the Da Vinci Code) trying to piece together a complex puzzle. The part of the sleuthing that I find the most challenging and the most satisfying is uncovering sophisticated link schemes -- from aggressive link buying like what Fresh Pair and H&R Block are doing, to the most egregious spammers who obscure their ill-gotten links through cloaking and sneaky redirects. I recall back in 2004 figuring out that Findgiftcards.com was funneling link gain to their network of sites from legit sites using their free hit counter hosted at 123counters.com as the vector. That hit counter spread their spam by embedding keyword-rich links underneath the hit counter in the HTML code that the webmaster was supposed to copy-and-paste. Wow, that was like a scavenger hunt! I wrote about that one in Catalog Age. Funny, it wasn't long after that they disappeared from Google. ;-) Immediately prior to that they were #1 for "gift certificates." Oops, sorry guys! :-D

If "deconstructing" sophisticated search engine spam doesn't sound like fun to you, then you probably won't appreciate the blast I had reverse engineering As-Seen-on-TV-Store-1.com last year in my sixth installment of my SEO Report Card column for Practical Ecommerce magazine. This black hatter had no idea my published critique was coming; I'm sure they didn't appreciate me airing their dirty laundry in public! But the sins of others can serve as a great teacher.

That affiliate site was a house of cards ready to fall. Here are a couple of the reasons why (I elaborate more in my full article)...

These guys have inbound links and link text -- in spades! Yahoo! Site Explorer reveals over 6,500 inlinks to the site, excluding internal links. These links include some very reputable sites such as unesco.org/wfeo. Often times the link text is great too -- full of keywords. But the linking sites aren't relevant. Upon closer inspection, the links have been obtained by duping webmasters into posting a hit counter (e.g. from freestatscounter.com, freehitcounters.net, etc.) that contains links to doorway pages. (Hmm... sounds familiar, eh!)

"But wait, there's more!" (I'm using my infomercial voice while saying that!) -- a veritable minefield of bogus feedbacks, link farming, spam blogs (splogs), and doorway pages that have lost link popularity. 

For the rest of the findings, read the full article. Now. I promise you'll like it!

"Gray hat SEO" is that fuzzy area of search engine optimization between ethical SEO (i.e. "white hat") and the really naughty stuff that you'll get banned for if you get caught (i.e. "black hat"). Some say that white hat SEO is idealistic, whereas gray hat SEO is pragmatic, employed by SEOs with keen business acumen. I say it's simply pushing one's luck.

The difference between white hat SEO and black hat SEO is profound and obvious. But the gray area in between the two is not so easy to define. Cloaking and pagejacking are obviously black hat. But what about stuffing the same keyword dozens of times into dozens of links on a web page? Or tucking a keyword away in the top left corner of the page in order to maximize its keyword prominence?

Consider the following examples, illustrated with screenshotted excerpts of three different homepages...

HOMEPAGE #1:

• Are there too many links?
• Is there too much repetition of the same keyword in the anchor text of these links?
• Is the link text too light? (the rest of the text on the page is markedly darker)

HOMEPAGE #2:

• Are there too many keywords stuffed into title attributes of links? (an example of which was made visible in the above screenshot by mousing over one of the links)
• Are there too many links?
• Is the color of the text too similar to the background?

HOMEPAGE #3:

• Is the keyword phrase in the top left of the page too obscured?
• Was it excessive for them to have applied this tactic to over a thousand pages?

Clearly these companies are into aggressive SEO. But have they crossed the line? What do you think??

What I find most interesting is the fact that all three of the sites rank really well for keywords they've targeted, and it appears due, at least in part, to these aggressive tactics. Top ten rankings in Google for many of the keywords targeted by the anchor text of homepages #1 and #2, and for many of the keywords targeted in the top left corner of a thousand+ pages of site #3. I can see the allure of these tactics -- after all, they seem to work!