I was surprised to have a gray hat SEO company ask me to help them with their SEO. I’m not only white hat, I’m sort of militantly white hat. A developer suggested to me last week that it wasn’t really my personal responsibility to make the web a better place, but I sort of feel that it is. I mean, you’d pick up litter in your community, wouldn’t you?
Anyway, I was startled. I asked Rosie’s opinion, and she said I should help them out.
“What are you going to say? I don’t approve of the way you make money, you slut, so I won’t write for you?”
The more I think about it, though, the more it seems reasonable. It isn’t as though gray hat SEOs believe in the long term value of their techniques. Black hats are out to make dishonest money fast and skip town (metaphorically speaking) and gray hats are out to provide some temporary cheap thrills for site owners who don’t want to bother improving their site’s results with high quality content and excellent usability.
For their own websites, though, gray hats want real improvements. They don’t plan to get out of town fast; they want to sell their questionable goods to as many people as possible — just like other businesses. Naturally, they won’t use their own methods on their own sites.
Why should you?
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