Hold Your Ground, Rand.

Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz has made a call to his readership to determine the future of black and gray-hat content on their blog. Being a staunch advocate of information openness in the Search Engine industry, I have decided to chime into a handful of the issues/questions which Rand poses to his audience. I have quoted liberally, but you ought to read his post in its entirity.

We’ve received some harsh criticism from those who engage in black/gray hat practices and been asked to STFU about these topics. Spam, obviously, succeeds more when less is known about it, so its natural for those with a potential interest to keep it close to the vest.

If SEOMoz knows about these techniques, then the search engines already knows about these techniques. No effective or reasonable search engine optimizer – blackhat or whitehat – should rely on the silence of others to accomplish their goals.

We’ve gotten some very angry comments/emails/posts written about exposing specific sites that engage in manipulative practices as well, both from the site owners themselves and from those who don’t think “outing” spammers is an appropriate practice for those in the SEO field.

SEOMoz does not “out” spammers. Their techniques can and will be discovered by Google and, often, a public outting of this manner gives the “spammer” a public forum to defend his or her actions. I would much rather have a site be targeted because it was listed on SEOMoz’s blog than by some new algo or Google hand-edit.

Several folks who work for search engines have expressed disappointment and frustration in our open discussions of these topics, both because they’re worried that our coverage will appear to be an endorsement and because they feel a wide audience with knowledge of this material, even when accompanied by an appropriate warning, may attempt more abuse of their systems (and perhaps for other reasons that I haven’t heard as well).

If readers want an incomplete view of the world of Search Engine Optimization, they can go hang out with Doug. I believe that SEOMoz’s focus on providing accurate but professionally filtered representation of the latest information in search would be greatly tarnished, by broad strokes, black and grey hat information were ignored or censored.

We recently lost a very large, very important contract due to the client asking a respected source in the search community about our work and hearing that our work is “black hat and could get them banned from the engines.” Apparently, this association came not from any “black hat” work we’ve done, but from the blog post content 🙁

The respected source in the search community clearly ought not be respected. SEOMoz, ever since the wonderful piece between yourself and Mick, has been a beacon of what is generally accepted as white hat SEO. Anyone who doesn’t know that is either a radical (Doug) or an idiot, but certainly not a “respected source”.

…we mentioned that search engine representatives would not be present, and despite my specific announcement that the seminar would contain no black hat material…

This is actually extremely important – people make mistakes on their sites and unless webmasters can feel comfortable that their Q&A with professionals is private, there will not be room for improvement. In my opinion, the mere fact that search engine representatives are in nearly every session of every conference makes them lose much of their value.

Blog posts such as our WB Friday Give it Up and White Hat Cloaking suggested that we might be endorsing or recommending black hat tactics. I believe this is due to misinterpretation or a careless reading/listening to the caveats and warnings we provided, but it’s true that particularly on the web (but nearly everywhere in life), content often comes through with a very different perception than how the message was intended.

The goal, hopefully, of SEOMoz is to educate. If they limit their content to only information with which everyone is comfortable, written in language with which everyone is comfortable, the only thing they will accomplish is making people comfortable. At that point, they are useless.