Black Hat SEO

This week in class, we talked about communication digital environments. We spent a lot of time talking about search engine optimization, or SEO. Dr. Yadav said that we weren't going to spend a whole lot of time talking about the "dark side" of this particular industry, so I decided to do some research myself. I always find unethical computing practices intriguing, because they help me understand how people think, and how to get around a problem.

I found an article called "The Dark Side of SEO." Here's the link:

http://www.business2community.com/seo/infographic-the-dark-side-of-seo-techniques-0170200

The article divides up these "black hat" techniques into 3 categories: Development spam, Content spam, and Link spam. Apparently there are a plethora of ways to unethically engage in SEO. Some of the terms that stuck out to me were: Cookie stuffing, sybil attack, scrapper sites, splogs, meta-tag stuffing, and link farms.

My company only engages in "white hat" SEO practices - or at least that's what my SEO guy tells me. But it's good to know that even in the world of developing webpages and online marketing, there is a way to be a above reproach and still extremely successful.

In class last week, we learned about how the internet actually works. Our professor had a demonstration that, for the first time in my life, helped me really grasp how information was sent over the internet. Dr. Yadav handed several pieces of paper to a student at the front of the classroom. He told the student to pass the pieces of paper, one at a time, to his peers around him, and have everyone continue to pass them along to a girl at the back of the classroom. The pieces of paper took many different routes throughout the classroom. Some even made circles through groups of students. But eventually, the girl at the back received all of the pieces of paper, and put them together in such a way that they formed a message.

I had never really understood how genius the structure of the internet is. I just wrote it off in my mind as a mystery that I would never be able to solve. I think that this Dr. Yadav's interactive teaching style will help me not only understand the internet, but also leave me with concrete marketing applications.