@kwblue 129975 wrote:
2. Grey Hat SEO – Manipulative of SE’s, but not unethical
a. Blog and Ping – Pinging Blogs to let the search engines know that a page has been updated (This can and has been abused)
b. Link Exchange – This is not seen as acceptable to Google and other SE’s, but we all do it.
c. Cloaking of content to improve keywords while showing the user a more salesy page (done by many large companies to improve the SERPS for graphical pages)
d. Submittal (auto or manual) to Digg, Twit This, FeedBurner, Rojo, etc (done on my blogs and forums, also done here at CAP and many other places)
e. Using Social Networks to ‘Add A Link’ to your website. This is mainly social bookmarking (can be abused)
I don’t think Grey/Gray Hat is unethical, I just think it means usage of web services that do not fall into Black Hat (devious methods).
Also, cloaking is not against Google’s TOS. Google states that it “may remove sites found to be cloaking”. Cloaking is not as devious as people think, also, people don’t know the full definition of cloaking. From a basic point of view cloaking is displaying different information to different users or spiders/bots. Sometimes this is totally acceptable. If someone comes to BMW.de and wants to buy a BMW but have come from the USA (detected by USA IP Address) then it is perfectly fine to either redirect or display USA info (with the option to change the locale in case the surfer is a german in the States)…
Anyhoo. This thread has gotten crazy!
Wasn’t it something to do with someone “outing” a black hatter?