It’s Wednesday and time for another hypothetical. This week I figured we would bring it back to our industry. It’s something that everyone in our industry is up against at one time or another, but let’s see which direction you go.
You come up with a new idea that you think will do really well online. A website is put together, product developed and you’re now at the point of promoting your new site and product. You’re faced with two options:
- Black Hat Techniques – You can apply a few black hat techniques you know are against the search engine terms but the techniques guarantee you’ll be put in the number one spot for all of your search terms for a minimum of 3 months. The problem is, your site can be dropped out of sight at any moment after the 3 month mark.
or
- White Hat Techniques – You go strictly white hat and stay so far away from anything shady, other white hats look at your site and think you’re the cleanest webmaster on the block. The only guarantee is you’ll be in the top 20 for a few of your search terms after 6 months of hard work. The problem is, 50% of the sites ranking higher than you are using black hat techniques and you’ll never be able to out rank them and the other 50% are large corporations and wikipedia that will always be ranked higher.
Which way do you turn and why?