Black Hat, White Hat, Tomatoe, Tamato
I have spent quite a bit of time lately considering SEO ethics–Black Hat, Grey Hat and White Hat philosophy and techniques.
There are clearly link-building techniques that are “black hat” because they are deceptive to both end users and search engines. Those I can really wrap my head around.
But when a technique is only deceptive to either end users or search engines, things start to get grey. Especially when advertising/promoting a web page to end users can be seen as deceptive or spammy to a search engine–even though an end user would want to find that content. For example, text link ads or paid blog post can be examples of this.
Sometimes, you are first on the scene with great content, and so you earn links organically. Other times, you are a little late to the game, but still have great content. However, webmasters are going to follow who they are going to follow, and link to whom they are going to link to–habits are hard to change. And if you are late or not as loud (with your link building efforts), there is a good chance that you can simply remain invisible.
So how can you get links?
Is it fair, is it right, that even though your content is good as or better than the content from other websites, you are lost in the noise of the Internet, simply because webmasters are either overwhelmed or other websites are out-promoting your website?
Is there a rational for using paid links, for example, to prime your link-building efforts in order to have your content heard and seen?
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