The Difference Between A Regular SEO Blog Post And SEO Outing

Posted on April 19, 2012

I seriously don’t get the reasons against outing in the SEO industry. The crazy thing is we can write whatever we want about white hat sites, but should all be silent about black hat sites. A regular SEO case study blog post and an outing blog post is identical, except one is about white hat sites, the other about black hat sites.

Share Post!

http://twitter.com/ianhowells Ian Howells

You’re leaving out the actual difference.

One is praise meant to make someone look good.

The other is typically either whining, condescending, or frustration over what’s working in Google, meant to make a site look bad and/or get action taken against them.

One is building someone up, while the other is trying to take someone down.

Now – if the site “deserves” to get taken down is a whole other discussion. But – we can’t actually act like these are actually the same thing. That’s like saying stealing a million dollars from a bank and stealing a bag of groceries so your family can eat are the same thing since they’re both stealing.
http://twitter.com/seobook SEO Book

Exactly right Ian…it is the framing that is both self-serving and shady.

For instance, look at how the spot Thomas interns/studies/works/etc. at framed our affiliate program for using 301 redirects in an interview with Shoemoney. Then later read their blog post where they mentioned that they were thinking about using 301 redirects on their affiliate program…or how Distilled stated how using internal 301 redirects to try to outrank our site for SEO tools was “advanced” SEO.

In one case it is spam and we ask “who should Google come down on” and in the other (years later I might add) it suddenly and magically becomes “advanced.”

I welcome an educated response to this comment, but I don’t expect one.
- http://twitter.com/thogenhaven Thomas Høgenhaven
  
  Gees, way to start a respectable discussion: “I welcome an educated response to this comment, but I don’t expect
  one that is educated, reasonable & can legitimately refute what I
  just wrote.”
  
  Anywho, my point is this: If I write an analysis of how a site rank – out of curiosity and pure research intention – and that site happened to be black hat – you would still call it outing DESPITE it not being self-serving. This means you effectively create a tabu zone, making it legitimate to write about white but not black.
  
  And it’s a bit naive to say that black hat = inventive. Look at all the shit that ranks, that does not deserve to. THEY are self-serving.
  
  Hope this is educated enough to you.
  - http://twitter.com/seobook SEO Book
    
    Ah…but the outing is almost always done in a self-serving way.
    
    If that pattern wasn’t in tact then I don’t think people would find it quite as tasteless as they have.
    
    However …
    
    The example of trying to smoke our affiliate program & use the exact same technique is a perfectly illustrative example.
    
    The example of saying web directories are crap to pitch a member’s only directory list is a perfectly illustrative example.
    
    The recent example of some link analysis tool being marketed by highlighting how some site that got hit was black hat & revealing their links publicy to set up other sites getting hit is a perfectly illustrative example.
    
    These purely research posts are rarely done on personal blogs and are rarely done without an associated sales pitch. If we ignore those then we simply ignore why they were created in the first place.
    - http://twitter.com/thogenhaven Thomas Høgenhaven
      
      So, just to recap:
      
      You do not mind outing if there is no self-serving motive behind? If I write a blog post about how BurtsApples.com uses blog network to rank for Organic Apples while I do not have any stake in any SERPs related to organic apples, it is okay?
      
      But if I do have a stake, it is not okay for me to out?
      
      That kinda makes sense to me – but it does entail that one cannot just dismiss (nor embrace) outing in general, but have to critically analyze the motive behind each outing before criticizing.
      - http://twitter.com/seobook SEO Book
        
        The other issue is if you are not certain the person who is being outed is responsible for it then it can still be a screw job. For example, someone could buy spam links for a site…just the existence of the spam links does not mean that the site that they are pointing at is responsible for their being. In some cases when people buy links they point multiple links at different sites, to make it harder to know who the buyer is. And sometimes someone doing moonlighting might do something sketchy. And sometimes there is flat out competitive sabotage (in fact, a friend was IMing me about this happening to a client…under an hour ago).
        
        If a person sees a webmaster that they know owns site x is intentionally building loads of spam links into site x and then is doing weird redirects and such into other sites you know they own…then perhaps there is some bit more certainty that they are at least associated with it.
        
        However, even then one can be in a bad spot. Look what happened to Dan Thies … his tweet sounded like gloating…and now his site has thousands of spam links that are impossible to remove & his blog has likely been blacklisted in some centralized anti-spam databases.
        
        I am not saying “this is right and wrong” … rather I am saying that those who typically frame the debate in terms of “ethics” & justify potentially destroying someone else’s life (even if they are perhaps not guilty of doing anything wrong) are found taking the low road quite often!
http://twitter.com/john4math John Barth

SEO outings are more fun to read IMO.
http://twitter.com/robdwoods Rob Woods

I don’t out others but at it’s heart, all outing is doing is sharing publicly available information. If you don’t want to get caught, don’t do things people can easily uncover. Yes, it’s a pain in the wallet when a site you’ve built to make money through Google, by doing things Google doesn’t want you to do, gets noticed by Google and they change where you rank on their search engine. Accept the calculated risk that comes with making money from a tactic that you should know is high risk. That’s what risk means. It’s not a sure thing and sometimes you come down on the side of it not working out. Sometimes you get away with it. Them’s the breaks. And don’t base your ability to pay your mortgage or feed your kids on income from using these high risk tactics. That’s just plain irresponsible and short sighted. If you get outed, let’s be honest, you knew you were doing something Google didn’t want you to do and you got caught. You took a risk and it didn’t work out. Know that it’s a risk going in and if it doesn’t work out, move on. Wishing that people wouldn’t out won’t make it go away. They will. They ALWAYS will. Wishing that they wouldn’t is frankly just naive. If you can’t live with that, don’t use those tactics. …and yes, I’ve had very lucrative sites outed and yes, they’ve been penalized, so I know whereof I speak.
- http://twitter.com/seobook SEO Book
  
  This the part of the problem though. If a company hires an SEO they don’t know for certain if that SEO is doing something shady. Further, with Google’s warning messages galore, they are building the negative SEO industry in a big way.
  
  Thus when you get “caught” it might just be highlighting competitive sabotage.

In case you need me…

Thomas Høgenhaven: Online Marketing From A Research Perspective

The Difference Between A Regular SEO Blog Post And SEO Outing