black hat white hat

SEO Trivia: “Black hat, white hat”

17 May

“I coined the term “black hat, white hat” sometime around 2002. It was based on something I noticed in cowboy movies when I was a kid. The good cowboys all wore white hats and the bad guys wore black. I used it as an analogy for those online marketers who stuck to Google’s guidelines (particularly around linking practices) and those …

SEO Trivia: “The story of backlinks”

18 Apr

Once upon a time two of the nerds at Stanford were not satisfied with the current options for searching online, so they attempted to develop a better way. Being long-time academics, they eventually decided to take the way academic papers were organized and apply that to webpages. A quick and fairly objective way to judge the quality of an academic …