Many aspects of onsite and offsite search engine optimization are nothing more than an attempt to deceive the search engines in to believing that your site is the authority on whatever keywords you are trying to rank for. Keyword rich content that is not regularly updated will help you rank for very targeted long tail keywords such as your dealership name any other “optimization” is pure search engine deception!!

In a recent conversation with an expert automotive SEO we discussed this fact and I was met with agreement to an extent. When I pointed out that all automotive seo is search engine manipulation and if you are going to manipulate search engine results in any unnatural way you might as well automate as much of it as possible and that is where the difference of opinion occurred.

I have several sites that bring in a nice income from affiliate marketing and dominate search results for long tail searches (Sorry No Examples) and the optimization was generated from pure brute force google bombing on these very non competitive keyword, with the additional benefit of causing the individual landing pages to rank well for very competitive search terms. Some would call this black hat SEO and a company that markets SEO services would not want their clients to know this is how they push their sites up for their keywords or would use this knowledge to sell against a competitor that uses this tactic and they did not.

Title Tags, Meta Keywords, Site Maps and Site Descriptions are used by the search engines as notification tools to let them know what content should be found at the site when the spiders arrive and give searchers some indication of what they should find when they arrive and are not given the same weight as the content found on site or the quality and number of back links.

Enter the SEO specialist. While most content on automotive websites is static or rarely updated the only option for SEO companies is to increase the number of back links to a site either to the home page or to other areas of your online offerings. Anchor links, with used car terms, to your used car inventory should cause cause that directory to rank better than your home page for the same terms while passing back some authority of those links back to your home page to help it rank better for the more generic search terms and the inclusive used car term to help pick up one more position in the serps and effectively knock your competitor out of a spot on the page one results. It’s how these anchor links are acquired is where the difference of opinion in white hat and black hat SEO come in.

While true black hat SEO is more about automatic redirection, cloaked content and search engine spam. Many, SEO Vendors, would equate auto generated content, manipulated scraped content, database generated sites, automated submissions and automated bookmarking as black hat as well, because it is manipulating the number and relevance of the links pushing back to the content being optimized and it is creating multiple layers of content with little or no value other than optimizing something else.

Any form of “link building” is unnatural, unless it is from sites that voluntarily link to your content, and creates no more value to the search engine results than those acquired by using the techniques listed above. Any link created to your site for SEO purposes violates Google’s Paid Link Guidelines no matter who or where the link comes from. So any SEO firm that claims to participate in only “White Hat” SEO is actually using a deceptive pitch. Paying someone to build links to your site other than submitting it to directories, which has lost a ton of value, is search engine manipulation even if it is via evergreen blogs, squidoo lenses, article submissions and press releases with the sole purpose to SEO other sites. This is Google Bombing, which still works, it is just done in a way to appear more legitimate even though it is not.

It is not really a matter of which is right or wrong. They both work and are search engine manipulation not optimization.

Don’t beleive Google Bombing still works? Try Googling “click here” with or with out the quotes and tell me what you find….

Technorati Tags: black hat, search engine optimization, SEO