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Black Hat Social Media Marketing Is A Failed Concept
By dan | March 24, 2007
Social media sites, news tagging sites, bookmarking sites.
These services are powerful resources for marketing or brand-building your brand, but you just can’t step into them with the usual SEO mentality. I’m talking black hat tactics. The tricks of dark SEO that are meant to manipulate search engines by artificially inflating the perceived value of a site. Yep, that stuff won’t work on social media sites.
However, if you’re a white hatter, then social media marketing is just a natural extension of your SEO skills, an SEO 2.0 of sorts. More on this in a second..
Here are reasons why black hat SEO dies with social media. Well, dies is a strong word. Either way, web 2.0 is making the black hat payoff less and less rewarding.
Black hat SEO is meant for machines. The optimization strives to manipulate search engine algorithms. Social media sites, however, have much lower dependence on algorithms. Posts are organized by tags and categories created by human beings. Social media marketing, then, must focus on influencing people. And people are not won over by cloaking trickery and onpage optimization factors such as keyword density.
Much black hat SEO is focused on generating continuous first time visitors through search engines. These are people who most likely have never heard of your site, and you have no relationship with them. Usually, you are not looking for a relationship with them. Many black hat SEO tactics are largely focused making a quick buck from first-time visitors.
Since individuals search Google (not groups or communities) multiple search engine users can stumble upon the same black hat website without being warned, even if other searchers have had bad experiences at the shady site.
So each web searcher unfortunately must blindly click on each search result without consulting the experiences of previous web searchers. But social media sites, however, depend on community involvement as a method for promoting posted content to higher visibility. Social media users benefit from the comments or voting information of other members of the community. This interaction allows the community to pass its collective wisdom on to each user. The result is that a black hatter can only fool a small number of users before he is outed by the community.
Traditional search engines created an environment that rewarded crafty black hat SEOs and spammers. Social media is different. The community interaction which is built into the structure of social media sites provides only diminishing rewards to black hat tactics. It makes black hat tactics more expensive & more time-consuming with smaller paydays. Instead, social media sites reward promotion tactics that involve quality user-participation, building a reputation, and long-term consistency.
What about white hat SEOs? I agree with Cameron Olthuis. White hats should be able to make the transition to social media fairly effortlessly. Why? Because white hat tactics are largely based around writing highly-useful, in-demand content and providing website visitors with valued resources. And these should be the same goals of the social media marketer: know your audience and feed them what they want!
Topics: Social Media, Credibility, Black Hat, White Hat, SPAM |
