The second thing you’ll need if you’re doing SEO.

The second thing you’ll need if you’re doing is an attitude adjustment. Let me state the following:
- You are in business to make money for yourself.
- Google is not your friend. Google is not ANYONE’s friend, they are a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Kiss their ass at your peril.
- there is no blackhat or white hat. There are only techniques and levels of risk.

Let’s address the first point. You are in business to make money. I’ll assume you also run an ethic and moral company because you’re an ethical and moral person. That doesn’t mean I’m going to listen to you carry on about how you’re making the world a better place with your website or how content is king, or natural links are best. If you’re going to connect Google rankings to ethics, you’re in the wrong place.

Secondly, Google is a publicly traded company. They are required to make money for their shareholders. Not have a hugfest. Or ‘do no evil’. MAKE MONEY FOR THEIR SHAREHOLDERS. Their interests are their interests first, not yours, not ‘organize the world’s data’ or any other crap. Ignore this at your peril. If you think a company that cows to China’s dictators, scrapes and republishes entire websites and will ban entire websites at the drop of a hat is your friend, you’re in the wrong place. Google is using your web site to make them their billions. Turnabout is fair play.

Their is no blackhat and white hat. And if there is, blackhat is NOT illegal when used in an SEO sense. Nor is it immoral, unethical or bad for the web. Blackhatters for the most part do not ‘hack’.

White hat means you abide by Google’s terms of service. If you feel the need to do that, reread my second point above. And if you still feel the need to be a whitehat, go hug a tree somewhere else.

Black hat means two things. First, black hatters do not abide by the search engine’s term of service. (Again, nobody’s forcing you to abide by any publicly traded companies arbitrary terms of service). Secondly, they tend to find holes in the search engine’s algorithm and exploit those holes. Blackhatters also automate tasks. They set up hundreds of websites to churn and burn where a white hatter will run on one only.

Of course, there’s a very large range between the two. What I do, and what I’ll be talking about here is how to mostly look like a white hat, but to also test some grey hat stuff. I don’t do true blackhat (honestly, I’m not smart enough to stay ahead of the search engines. I prefer to build so that they come to me instead).

In that large grey range of course are very large tolerances of risk and reward. Where you fall in that range should be a deliberate choice, as mine was. However you should also dabble seperately outside your range in order to learn and grow. It’s worth noting that Google continues to change the line where white hat is. You can find yourself a grey hat one day having done nothing different - Google just decides what was OK today was not OK tomorrow.

If you’re just getting started out with SEO, stick to white hat as much as you can. The time to learn grey is not on your money sites or on any sites where you have a trail.