WebProNews

Tamar Weinberg at Search Engine Roundtable points to a post (actually two) from the Microsoft Office Live Small Business Blog, where Senior Product Manager Skip Chilcott talks about link exchanges as a "popular way to generate more links." Tamar then talks about a blogger who called them on this, and refers to link exchanges as "Black Hat SEO."

Now Tamar's post seems to be more aimed at how out of touch Microsoft is when it comes to search (and while that is probably a subject worth talking about too), I want to look more at the Link exchanges as Black Hat SEO side of the coin.

What is Black Hat SEO to you?

To Google, I would certainly say paid links are up there (more on that debate here). The entry for "Black Hat SEO" on Wikipedia redirects to "Spamdexing" and talks about things like:

- Keyword Stuffing
- Hidden Text
- Meta Tag Stuffing
- Doorway pages
- Scraper Sites
- Link Farms
- Spam blogs
- Page Hijacking
- Buying Expired Domains
- Cookie Stuffing
- Blog/comment/wiki spam
- Mirror sites
- URL redirection
- Cloaking, etc.

Does the simple exchange of links between peers really belong on this list? It may not have as much of an effect on your rankings as it once did anyway, but I think I'm gong to have to go with Tamar on dubbing link exchanges as black hat being a little overboard.

"The idea that it's 'black hat' might be a stretch; link exchanges themselves are sketchy," writes Tamar. "Most would consider black hat SEO to be a lot worse than a simple link exchange that thousands of webmasters do daily."

I'm not sure how much it's going to matter if all this talk about search results going more personalization-based comes to fruition anyway. This is after all, a strategy that should eliminate the benefits of a lot of "black hat" methods anyway.