If You’re Hat Ain’t Black You Don’t Know Jack!

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I was visiting a web forum this weekend and came across post after post of “if I do this to my website what will Google do” or “Google doesn’t like it when webmasters do this“. Yes we were all newbies and one point and asking questions is part of the learning experience, however doing things because Google likes or doesn’t like it, is the wrong attitude to have.

First off Google is not the government or any other law making body. They put out a series of guidelines, which are just that, guidelines. If you break them, the world isn’t going to open up at your feet and swallow you whole, so get a grip. Additionally Google doesn’t make the guidelines or standards for the world wide web, that’s the job of the W3c. While google may be doing everything they possibly can to get themselves involved in every layer of the internet so they can data mine it until their mainframes sizzle and fuse into a lump of silicon, they are a publicly traded company who’s primary objective is to make money for their shareholders on a continual and regular basis, by any means that are within the law, period end of sentence.

So if you want to learn what’s going on in SEO and what makes a website rank or not rank, you’re going to need to get off your butt, push the boundaries, do things differently, and think outside of the box. Take a few domains every year try some crazy stuff, experiment with cloaking, push the limits, dabble in the dark arts and see what happens. If you really want to get some good data build two sites about the same topic promote one using “white hat” tactics and the other with “black hat” tactics compare the end results. Which site gets more links, which site gets more traffic, which site makes more money, do some data mining of your own try to figure out what happened and why.

Should you go out and play Russian roulette with your 4 year old authority site with 3000 pages of unique content, obviously not. However just because you have that kind of site doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be experimenting and pushing and prodding Google, Yahoo and MSN to find new and more effective methods ranking with other websites. If you are going to live in fear of Google and their guidelines, your nothing more than their lap dog.

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