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My basic assumption is that ‘white hat’ is all about being a goody-two-shoes and sticking to the rules. Abiding the law. Hiding under the table whenever trouble comes wandering into the saloon.

Whereas ‘black hat’ is all about being that trouble. A gun-slinging outlaw, working on the edge of society, disobeying the rules and generally being a bit dangerous and sexy. I assume you get a cooler costume too.

I guess the temptation to be that second guy is always strong. 

However being that second guy, the one with the really good boots and slightly darker theme music, means that you won’t be long for this world. It’s only a matter of time before you’re either rounded-up by the lawmen or snuffed out and put in the ground with nothing but a lonely horse to mourn your passing. 

By lawmen I of course mean Google, and Google can indeed be a merciless punisher of the transgressive.

Thanks to an artificial growth-hacking tactic, Rap Genius suffered a 10 day ban from Google last December. That may not sound like too much of a punishment, however the once popular and high ranking website suffered an 80% plummet in its traffic and four months later has yet to pull back its authority.

I just searched ‘Jay-Z lyrics’ on Google and Rap Genius is halfway down the first results page when last year it would have been at the top.

It’s enough to scare anyone straight.

How to be good:

‘White hat’ isn’t just about avoiding punishment. It’s about best practice. It’s about making your website more visible and accessible for the user, in a fair and transparent way.

Most importantly ‘white hat’ is about optimising your website for a human audience, not to manipulate search results for ill-gotten gains. For example, coercing a searcher into visiting a site that they may think is valuable because it’s ranked at the top, but is actually a site full of artificial link-building, keyword stuffing and badly written content.

This activity creates general distrust in the internet and search engine results pages as a viable means of finding relevant information.

Here’s how to be ‘white hat’:

Content

If you’re not producing good, relevant, entertaining, helpful content at a regular rate, then all of the other white or black hat practices won’t help you one little bit.

Google has an algorithm that’s complicated, ever-changing and impossible to second-guess. All you can guarantee is that no matter what Google and other search engines are looking for in terms of ‘site health’, the value of your content will always be the top priority.

Write for human readers not search engines. 

Internal links

Linking to content within your own site is a great indicator to search engines that your site has value.

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number though. Don’t overstuff the page with links, even if each and every one of them is an internal link to relevant content. Think about the page in terms of the reader.

If the first few paragraphs of an article contain links in every sentence a reader will either consciously or subconsciously assume this piece is a mere ‘link-building exercise’ and trust the content less. Search engines will make a similar assumption.

Two or three good quality internal links to relevant content, using accurate anchor text, spread throughout the article is the best practice here.

Natural link building

Google treats a link from another website to your site as a vote of confidence. Google will therefore rank you higher based on that vote. Therefore the more links the better. 

These links should be relevant though and of an organic quality. Not paid-for or gained through artificial, unrelated means. 

Google explicitly states that its algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. How much truck you have with this statement and whether Google runs an entirely infallible ship when it comes to deciding natural links to unnatural ones can be debated for the next… well, however long Google will remain the dominant presence in search. 

Navigation

Create a naturally flowing hierarchy. Make it easy for users to journey from general site information to more specific information. Provide breadcrumbs so users can easily navigate back and forth, and so users know where they are in the general layout of your website if they’ve arrived on page via other means.

Make sure you use text links to for navigation rather than animation or images. Search engine crawlers find text links easier to understand, as do users.

Titles and title tags

Search engines regard metadata and meta keywords as less important than they used to, thanks to years of black hat misuse, however the title of your page and its relevancy to the content will always be a highly important factor in SEO.

Choose a title that accurately reflects the topic of the page’s content. Create a unique tag for each page on your site. 

Avoid using extremely lengthy titles and stuffing irrelevant keywords in your title tags.

Meta description

Write the description of a page as accurately as possible. Again don’t stuff it full of keywords. Keep it plain, brief and most of all readable. 

The meta description will most likely appear as the two or three sentence description used in search results under the page title. This is what searchers will read and their decision to click-through to your site will largely be determined by how relevant and readable this description us.

Write for people, not search engines. I may have said that before. Maybe even twice before.

Images

Use brief but descriptive file names for your images, rather than ‘image0057’. 

Always fill in the ‘Alt’ attribute. Search engines can’t see your images, but they can read the ‘Alt’ text. It’s important to describe your image as accurately as possible as this may not only improve your ranking in image search but also improve the accessibility for those using ‘image reader’ software.

Anchor text

When you add a link to a piece of text, make sure the text is completely relevant to the link. Avoid phrases like ‘click here’.

Make sure your anchor text is just a short phrase rather than a lengthy sentence. Avoid excessively keyword-stuffed phrases written specifically to manipulate search engines. 

Comments

Prevent and remove spam from the comments sections of your site.

Ensure that ‘nofollow’ is implemented within your comments, so crawlers won’t assume that spam comments with links to erroneous or harmful websites are validated by your otherwise ethical site.

Again, the controversy of how beneficial the practice of nofollow really is can be debated until your throat is sore or until Twitter has exceeded its capacity, however it’s what Google says is best practice and this section is all about playing by the rules.

Which leads us neatly to…

How to be bad:

Here are the practices that Google explicitly states will earn you a penalty or ban from its results pages, as of writing this article today (2 April 2014).

Automatically generated content

Imagine paragraphs of random text generated by a piece of software, that make no sense to the reader but may contain particular keywords that artificially help rank a page higher in a results page. Don’t do that.

Link schemes

Nothing good has ever been described as a ‘scheme’. Practices to avoid are:  

• Buying and selling links.
• Excessive link exchanges – “hey buddy, I’ll link to you if you link to me.”
• Using automated programmes to create links to your site.
• Large scale guest-blogging as a link-building tactic. This is a topical and fairly touchy subject at the moment. Our editor-in-chief Graham Charlton explains the situation fully in his post Matt Cutts declares the death of guest blogging for SEO.

Cloaking and sneaky redirects

These are the practices of presenting different content to a user from what they were expecting when they discovered the result via a search engine.

Technology can be used to redirect a user to a different page or mask the HTML content served to a search engine with images or Flash animation.

Hidden text and links

Much like cloaking, hiding text or links in your content to manipulate search rankings is highly deceptive. 

Black hat practices include:

• Using white text on a white background.
• Locating text behind an image.
• Using CSS to position text off-screen.
• Setting the font size to zero.
• Hiding a link by only linking one small character. For example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph.

Doorway pages

These are fake pages that are content heavy and optimised with the tastiest keywords that are written purely for search engines and are therefore meaningless. The user never sees them because they will be redirected elsewhere.

Scraping

If you take articles from our site and republish them without permission you will get burnt, hombre. 

Keyword stuffing

As much as I love One Direction, overloading a webpage with words, such as One Direction, that your site is trying to rank for makes for a horrible user experience that One Direction would definitely frown upon.

Create content that’s informative, helpful or entertaining that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

In conclusion…

We have a simple mantra around the Econsultancy office: make the internet a better place. 

If you remember this at all times when practicing SEO and always keep the user’s experience central to your optimisation, then you have nothing to worry about.

And good sir, I will tip my ha… No, I couldn’t do it.

For 400 more pages of SEO guidance, download our most recent Search Engine Optimisation Best Practice Guide.

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

Remember when Moz rebranded way back in May 2013? (Seems like a lifetime ago for this Mozzer, but, alas: startup life.) Well, since then a ton of you have reached out in
our Q&A forum and on social media to ask just what we did to get this done.

Rebrands happen. While this is a late tale, it’s a story better told late than never, and it’s not as scary as you think, I promise.

Plan early. No, really early.

Don’t put off thinking about your social media accounts until the last second of your rebrand. In several cases, you have to work with other companies to get things done, and you might have to file trademark claims if your new brand name’s been taken. You’re also probably going to want to have some new artwork for your Facebook background as well as other social pretties, which means involving your graphic designers. Not to mention, besides your name, you’ll need to update company information, and I recommend putting documentation together to copy and paste from on game day. I personally got to work at 4 a.m. on Moz’s rebrand day, and I can tell you that preparation saved me from a lot of terrible mistakes by this non-morning person. Not enough earl grey in the world.

Twitter

You want to grab your new Twitter handle as soon as your company’s new name has been selected. You may need to negotiate with someone who might already have your choice. (Note that it’s against Twitter’s terms of service to pay for a handle.) Or if there’s only a squatter, you can reach out to Twitter for either a trademark violation or just
their inactive account policy.

At Moz, we secured our Twitter handle
@Moz almost two years before we rebranded, which meant that we were more than ready come rebrand day.

The actual switchover on Twitter was quite easy. We knew that we wanted to keep the old @SEOmoz account for monitoring and branding purposes, and we wanted to seamlessly transition all of our @SEOmoz followers to @Moz.

To switch, we first changed the @Moz account’s name to something random like @Moz23, and then we changed @SEOmoz to @Moz and @Moz23 to @SEOmoz. I had two different browsers open and logged into both accounts, which let me make all these changes in seconds. All followers of @SEOmoz were then automatically following @Moz.

If you’re verified, you do lose your account verification when you switch your name, but we were easily able to get it back by emailing our ad account folks at Twitter, who were clued into our rebrand before it happened. (We like to have backup plans for our backup plans.)

Facebook

Facebook is perhaps a trickier network on which to change your company name, particularly if you have more than 200 followers and your new brand name is three characters or less. We have both at
Moz, and this meant that Facebook had to make all these changes for us.

If you are changing an account with over 200 followers, you can apply to Facebook for a rebrand. We were lucky; at that time, we had an ads account person that we connected with directly; if there’s one time to call in a favor, it’s during a rebrand.

The good news is that since our rebrand, Facebook has made it easier to request a page name and vanity URL change. It can take up to several days or weeks to process on their end through this request page, so keep that in mind. I’ve also heard reports from those in the UK that this feature may not be released all over the world. You can also only change your vanity URL once!

Warning: Make sure you change your page name before you change your URL as Facebook needs to approve the name change.

Facebook required a ton of documentation from us around our rebrand. They wanted to see our legal trademark on Moz (easy enough with public records); our marketing documentation (we sent them an internal slide deck and screenshots of our new site in the staging environment); our rebrand press release; and documentation that we owned Moz.com. We also had to keep our fingers crossed that no one from Facebook would leak our rebrand (not that it was top secret or we’re famous).

Unfortunately, if you’re planning a rebrand and your company culture or rebrand situation is one of non-disclosure agreements and super-secretive plans, you may run into a roadblock here. Even at Moz, we questioned internally about how much information to give away without a non-disclosure agreement. You must upload documentation of your rebrand and legal rights to the new name. Here’s what Facebook says:

All said and done, we gave Facebook enough documentation and gave them our new name and the date and time to switch over our account. At 7 a.m. on May 30th, we went from SEOmoz to Moz on our Facebook company page, with our fans intact.

Your vanity URL is an easy change in Facebook through their interface. However, you can only change a page’s name once; so just in case your name change isn’t approved and you are forced to start from scratch, you want to keep that vanity URL free. Once you change the vanity URL, you cannot claim your old brand, and the old vanity URL will redirect users back to the Facebook homepage.

Google+

If anyone actually figures out how to change a vanity URL on Google+, please call me! But I get ahead of myself.

Back in the day when it seemed like only Lady Gaga had a vanity URL, SEOmoz had one. The legends say that one day the gods smiled on us, and we were granted +SEOmoz.

I thought in my naiveté that I could change the vanity URL since we already had one, or that after a period of time Google would realize we’d changed our name and do it for us. I was wrong on both accounts. I’d also hoped that maybe once everyone else started getting vanity URLs, there would be an option to edit ours. No such luck.

You can change your company page name on the profile section of the interface to anything you want: smelly cat, lover of potato chips, trampler of paper dinosaurs. Or, you know, your new rebranded name.

Pro tip: the old garble of random numbers assigned to you will still redirect you to your company even if you have a vanity URL. At Moz, we chose to use the number to link to our company page to from our site. This was so you, gentle reader, didn’t ask about site errors and so we hedged our bets in case we wake up one morning to a new vanity URL.

You also don’t want to forget about reverifying your new domain URL, especially if you’re working on authorship and publisher status. Make sure your web developer knows this, and don’t forget to have your bloggers change their personal G+ profiles to reflect your new domain URL for authorship.

Our G+ company page reads Moz now, but that darn vanity URL still says +SEOmoz. Good thing Google doesn’t care about SEO on its own pages. ;)

YouTube

Make sure your YouTube account—now forcibly associated with a Google+ page as part of YouTube’s anti-spam efforts—is a manager of your G+ business page. Then connect them together so all of your YouTube videos will appear on your G+ page; you can easily share your videos there; and so all your YouTube comments and shares show up in your G+ page notifications. While you don’t have to do this pre-rebrand, it will make your life easier as
your page name change on G+ will change your YouTube name, too, so you only have to do one.

There are some odd rules on YouTube surrounding vanity URLs, though. In some still confusing circumstances where YouTube does not allow you to have a vanity URL that anyone had ever associated wit han account—even if that account was deleted—we weren’t able to secure Moz, but instead went with
MozHQ for our vanity URL.

That said, as long as no one’s ever had your brand name, you can easily change your channel name to your brand without any worry. Make sure your brand’s YouTube account’s cooperating with the new G+ page connections, and that it’s associated with a non-employee business email address, not an employee’s email, whether personal or professional. At once place I worked, an employee accidentally hooked up their personal email to the YouTube account, and we lost our brand name!

Pinterest

Pinterest is super easy. All you have to do is edit away and easily change your brand information to your new name. Don’t forget, if you have a new domain URL, to re-verify your site.

If someone has your new brand name on Pinterest, you can
file a trademark claim. When we were SEOmoz, we were successful in getting the SEOmoz username from a squatter. However, when it came to Moz, the very active user wasn’t using the name in a way that violated our trademark, so Pinterest did not give us the Moz username. So we’re MozHQ there.

LinkedIn

Let me tell you, LinkedIn is not the community manager’s friend. Sadly, rebranding is no more friendly. At Moz, we have both a
Company Page and a Group.

Company Page

I have some bad news: There is no way to change your company page in a rebrand.

At Moz, we tried reaching out to LinkedIn so see if we could work something out, but no one returned our messages. :( Instead, we created an entirely new company page from scratch and posted a message on our old one that we’d moved. Which means we lost 7,000 followers there.

Special note: If you have a three letter name, LinkedIn will have a hard time displaying your new company name when employees go to update their profiles. After a legion of Mozzers filed support tickets with LinkedIn, we were able to get a workaround. However, before that, it kept trying to make us say we worked for Mozilla. :)

Group

For those of you running Groups, it’s super easy to rebrand. Mostly because your vanity URLs aren’t real vanity URLs, and you can easily change your name.

Note: We can’t change our Moz Group any longer because we passed a 20,000 member barrier, beyond which you must get extra LinkedIn permissions to grow your Group. This happened post-rebrand, so we were able to easily change it in May.

Now for your vanity URL, you can literally type any words into it, and it won’t matter. The numbers are what directs you to the right group. For example:

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Moz-2976409
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Kittens-2976409
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Matt-Cutts-2976409

All those URLs go straight to the Moz Group. :)

Instagram

While we aren’t using Instagram at Moz—yes, I know!—it’s pretty easy to change your Instagram information, as long as your brand name’s not taken. Simply edit your profile name and it and the vanity URL change:

If your brand name is taken, you can
file a trademark claim with them.

Tumblr

On Tumblr, there are two different places for you to change for your rebrand as you’ll want to change both your blog’s name and your URL. This will also likely depend on the purpose of your Tumblr. Here we use our Tumblr,
Moz Health, to update our customers and community when things go haywire.

For the name, this is located in editing featuring associated with the blog’s design and title field. (When I first started on Tumblr, I couldn’t decide on a name for my blog, and it took me forever to change it from Untitled!)

For the vanity URL, your username is associated with it, if you’re using tumblr.com as your URL. You can change your username to anything that’s not already taken.

Redirecting it a URL on your site:

Special note: If you have more than one Tumblr blog, you cannot change which is your main Tumblr blog associated with your account when you’re commenting via Tumblr. This can be frustrating. I recommend changing your username instead of starting a second Tumblr under the same username for your new brand. You don’t want people going to your old brand name!

More than just switching names.

Of course, a rebrand is more than just switching names on social. You have to make sure your social media messages are aligned with your PR, content, and more. You also have to respond to the people reaching out to you.

On Moz rebrand day through the next week, we sent out over 800 message from the main @Moz Twitter account, and that doesn’t even count the rest of our social accounts or our on-site blog and in our Q&A forum.

We had an entire action plan around the coverage for our community team, and I suggest starting not with the details but with your goals. Then, work down to those details and sharing with all those involved in the rebrand efforts.

Our community coverage rebrand goals were:

• Make sure that all accounts are switched over to Moz names.
• Make our audience happy with the rebrand.
• Answer 95% of all questions, in a timely manner, about the brand and the beta product.
• Have full coverage for launch and then next 24 hours as needed.

I’m happy to say that this part of our rebrand went very smoothly, and I wish the best for all of you going on the same adventure! I’d also love to hear about your stories.

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