Google, and indeed other search engines, decide what gets displayed in search results based on Best Value to the Customer.

The better the search results for the person doing the search, the more competitive Google's search offering is, the more customers return again and again to find what they need.

When someone does a search, Google wants the very best result to appear. What displays is the result of many automated processes on lots of metadata (data about data) relating to web pages on the Internet. With so much at stake, many companies and people come up with elaborate mechanisms or "tricks" to fool search engines into overrating a particular web page or website. As the years progressed, search engine companies got smarter and smarter about outmaneuvering such tricksters.

Black Hat versus White Hat

Activities that try to "trick" the search engines have been given the name "Black Hat". Activities that add value to the customer's experience are known as "White Hat".

No matter what idea you come up with for improving your position in search engine results, ask yourself this question: Does what I am doing add value to the visitor on the web? If the answer is No, then don't do it. If it does, consider doing it.

If a webmaster engages in enough so-called Black Hat activity, their website stands the risk of being penalized. That is, losing some or all of their PageRank or being blacklisted altogether.

Even if you are a non-technical person, you can always ask the question Does what I am doing add value to the visitor on the web?

Examples of Black Hat activities:

1. Reciprocal links just for the sake of increasing a website's Inbound Link count.
2. White text on a white background makes search engines think you are hiding text from the reader, but trying to hook the search engines with it.
3. Enbedding links to your web page into objects that sit on other people's websites.
4. Automating the stuffing of text into your website to make the search engines think you have "rapidly changing content"
5. Anything that automates the process of inbound link generation.

Examples of White Hat activities: