Follow Or No Follow | Help Desk | Yakezie Forums

It's a term for general SEO stuff that is unethical or will otherwise get you into trouble with the search engines. One example of this is sending one page to a search engine robot, and sending an entirely different page to a regular visitor. Other examples include hiding content from the search engines that is displayed to regular visitors, or engaging in other practices like stuffing your page with keywords but making them the same color as the background, or things like that…

I am not an SEO expert either so maybe someone like JT could come in and give us his thoughts. :)

KNS Financial said:

What exactly does "black hat" mean? Apparently it is something bad, but I really don't know what that is.

Invest It Wisely said:

I personally find it unethical if a site intentionally tries to deceive me that a link is not an affiliate when it is, such as say the link appears as "www.amazon.com/book" when it really has an affiliate tag. I also believe it goes against the terms of service of some affiliate providers.

 

I have no idea if it's considered black hat to do this or not, though. I think there's a middle ground like the /go that I've seen on other sites, which is clearly affiliate link though does not display the actual referral code.

 

TightFistedMiser said:

Hiding affiliate links is not black hat.  There are several good reasons to do so. The biggest reason is to keep people from stealing.  Also some people won't click on an affiliate link that looks like an affiliate link but they will click on a cloaked link.  Some people think that Google penalizes you if you have too many affiliate links on your site.  I'm skeptical of that but it is another possible reason to hide your links.

The /go type links are the ones I was referring to.  I'm not sure if I would consider the other type unethical or not but I suppose if one is trying to deceive it is probably unethical.  I mainly use Java for my links which makes it harder for people to steal your commissions but I don't think they are deceiving anyone.  Since it doesn't cost anyone to click on an affiliate link I don't really understand why some people are so against clicking on them.