Paid Links Constitute “Black Hat SEO”? Hardly…
This week, J.C. Penney was blasted for buying links to increase their search engine rankings.
The NY Times said buying links is a black hat SEO technique.
I thought that was a little strange. Paid links are hardly black hat. As Fred Black pointed out in his article about the J.C. Penney link buying scandal:
The article refers to link buying as “Black Hat”. That’s a joke. If anything, it’s little off-white or gray: nowhere, I repeat, nowhere near black. People that actually know and use black hat techniques would laugh at the whole article.
For proof of the “whiteness” of link buying, look no further than the services set up for buying links on other people’s domains. Text-link-ads.com comes to mind.
I feel bad for J.C. Penney getting so much heat from buying links. Some people seem genuinely upset that a company would dare to do such a thing.
It’s my humble opinion that ranking in the search engines is a game. The rules of the game are not always clear; they are not always applied consistently; they sometimes vary by market; and they most definitely vary from search engine to search engine.
Should we really be so surprised when a company decides to play the game to win and buys links in the process?
-Ryan M. Healy
