Black, white, grey...what colour is your SEO hat?

Search Engine Land and Sphinn have once again reopened the never ending discussion about white hat and black hat SEO:

Hot At Sphinn: SEO/SEM Standards & Certification, Black Hat Vs. White Hat & More

I do like the point about the fact that SEO is measured by the level of risk you take and how far you're willing to go to optimise. But as we all know, optimisation is not an exact science so the debate will never stop.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm all about ethical SEO.

What's your view?

The horror SEO story of the weekend...what not to do!

As you probably know by now, I'm a little bit obsessed with link building at the moment, and the story of JC Penney in the New York Times is a great example of link building gone wrong (New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google).

Basically, JC Penney hired a 3rd party Search marketing agency to look after their SEO, and the agency bought 2,000 links across a range of websites with no relevance to the products whatsoever.

While this worked for a while and ensured they got top rankings for a lot of their products, Google has now dropped them from its rankings until they clean up their act.

While the story may not end so badly for them because they are such a big corporation and probably have bargaining power with Google, any normal business would never recover from this kind of practice.

So as I always say, when looking at link building for your website, think relevance, white hat and beware of agencies promising too much.

Have you experienced issues with paid links in the past? share your stories here