2012 Welcome To SEO!

January 1, 2012 – It is time to start a category for SEO and this is the first post! Daggering (alantait.net/category/daggering/) is controlling whom can access your website. SpamWars (alantait.net/category/spamwars/) helps keep the junk off your website. SEO is a way to present your website to Search Engines so you will get not only more traffic, but better traffic.

Together, these three, Daggering, SpamWars, and SEO they make a formidable website team. What we are recommending would be considered by Google as White Hat SEO, we are the good guys!

WHITE HAT SEO

Why are we white hat? Well, white hat SEO is about grooming your site to better represent itself to the search engines so that search engines can create a better index for their customers use. Their customers, are the people who use the search engine to find things. They really do not care about your website, as long as it is properly indexed.

One key point in White Hat SEO is that your index listing actually matches your content – at least to a major extent. What they do not want is a website talking about children’s cartoon characters pointing to something most people do not think kids should be looking at!

BLACK HAT SEO

We could put “the opposite of white hat SEO!” Black hat SEO is doing anything to get a better SERP (Search Engine Results Page) position – as in the top position is best. One of the most deceptive is called cloaking.

CLOAKING

According to what I have read from Google, they consider cloaking to be presenting to them a page that is different from what you would show another website visitor. Imagine presenting the Googlebot a page based on the fact that it was a Googlebot! Say that cartoon page above. Then imagine presenting that page of content that is not suitable for children to anything not Googlebot, for example, to a Firefox web browser! Some child will click on the Google link for their favorite cartoon character and wham, find themselves deep into a place that their parents never wanted them to go. That would be an extreme case, but consider instead of cartoons it was programming tools. Likely people looking for that would be adults (although more kids may be there these days!). So that kind of cloaking, black hat SEO, would be targeting lonely programmers! (Please note that I am trying to avoid R rated words here!)

We think Cloaking is very deceptive. We do not do that. We believe you should show Google the same page as you show Firefox. We do not even think you should cloak a part of the page. Just let the chips fall where they may. We advocate for better content and organization and that is basically White Hat SEO.

DAGGERING

Daggering is NOT Cloaking! Daggering is making a choice! The choice in Daggering is based on who is allowed to view (capture) our website! Notice that while Cloaking is to show alternate content, daggering is the choice to show or not to show content.

For example, say there is a BoondocksBot that is scrapping my site daily and it refuses to obey my robots text file I have had active for a month! I decide to not allow scrappers… So I write code that refuses to reply to BoondocksBot – or sends them a 404 Error or some other code (403,410, 301, 302, etc.)! This is NOT cloaking.

A form of daggering is done with the robots.txt file for the good bots that obey that! So daggering is good, cloaking is bad. Daggering is not exactly SEO, but it can have a serious effect on your SEO! Likewise cloaking can have a serious effect on your SEO as well!

Note: It is best to stop good bots with robots.txt A bot that obeys robots.txt is a good bot. A bot that does not obey robots.txt is a bad bot.

SEO

So today I am adding this category for SEO to sort of collect the SEO articles.

I will likely add sub-categories like WordPress, PHPBB3, BlogSpot and Custom coded Websites to address these special needs.

In fact, today I plan to add a few new things, as I write articles for them:

Added Categories…

The following will be added to the Categories Menu Bar:

SEO – White Hat SEO

BlogSpot
PHPBB3
Websites
WordPress

Daggering – Preventing people from stealing from your site (also called BotWars when done by bots – which is usual).

SpamWars – Preventing people from adding to your site what you do not want (also a form of BotWars when done by bots. Daggering and SpamWars will be together on the BotWars Tag!). This may include Comments and Trackbacks!

Added Tags…

SEO
Black Hat SEO
BotWars
Cloaking
Daggering
SpamWars
White Hat SEO