Well, not really SEO. More like Black Hat SEO.
Anyone who reads this blog may have figured out by now that I am an Orthodox Jew. Not long ago, my wife received a book in the mail titled “they thought for themselves” by Sid Roth. The premise of the book was, 10 inspirational Jewish stories from 10 Inspirational Jews. The book sounded great from the title of the book and the description on the back cover, so naturally I started reading. It started out like any classic inspirational story: Guy is jaded by religion, something tragic happens in his life, some how he is saved, finds religion, and everyone lives happily ever after. Except this one took an odd turn from what I was expecting. I will remind you, this was supposed to be a “Jewish” story book. But when the man started watching christian television ans was saved from his paralysis from jesus, I was needless to say a bit confused. I flipped to the end of the other stories to make sure I was reading this correctly. Turns out they all end the same way with jesus saving someone from near catastrophe.
This post is not meant to spark some kind of religious debate, and this blog has nothing to do with mine or your beliefs (just in case someone wanted to start getting into a religious debate or call me out on something, fair warning, I will delete your comment). The point of this post is to educate about Black Hat SEO tactics and I guess cal out Sid Roth and the unethical Black Hat SEO tacticts which he is using to get exposure for his “spam” book.
As a brief definition of what black hat SEO is, it is the practice of tricking the search engines in thinking your page is more relevant than it really is. Many of these tactics include, hidden text, keyword spamming, putting up a flash site with keywords behind the content (cloaking), and the list goes on. In the mainstream SEO world this practice is seriously frowned upon and in fact, everyone should be somewhat scared of it because the engines are getting smarter and more often then not, these tactics will get your website penalized or banned (see Daves Post about JC Penny.
And the obvious comparison here is:
- Book has a title that is deceptive and has nothing to do with the content. Black Hat SEO’s use deceptive tacticts to get you to their site called cloaking.
- Book has a description on the back of the book that is aimed to target a specific audience, however, once you go there, the content has nothing to do with what you read. Black Hat SEO’s use a tactic called doorway pages where they create a page solely to target a specific audience in hopes that they will click through to the home page. When the user clicks, they are often redirected to a page that has nothing to do with what they were looking for.
- Book was promoted as a very “Jewish” sounding book, to make it more relevant sounding to the reader. Black Hat SEO’s often use keyword stuffing, a method of making a page sound more relevant to a search engine that it is in reality.
I guess the fact that I am writing this demonstrates my ethical aversion to black hat SEO tactics and apparently, I am not the only one who felt taken advantage of while reading that book. See what I mean!
And you can find many more reviews like the one above here
Most of the negative review’s I read began “I received this book in the mail” or this book was “sent free in the mail” or “this book arrived unsolicited” or even “I was surprised to see this book in the mail”. If I had to guess, thats typically a theme around black hat SEO.
(And to be perfectly clear, this post has absolutely nothing to do with any religious beliefs, it was simply a convenient way to demonstrate real life black hat SEO behavior)
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