First, let me start by saying that I regret to inform you that a site called SEOBlackHat.com even exists. I am even more regretful that sites such as this one have listed it as a top SEO blog. While their algorithm for ranking the top 25 SEO blogs has nothing to do with the credibility of the site’s information or integrity of its proposed tactics, and the rankings post is insanely old (2007), it’s still a shame to see such sites being referenced and given SEO link juice they clearly do not deserve. For this reason, I will not link to SEOBlackHat in this post. If you’d like to visit them, you’ll have to *manually* (that will be funny shortly) enter the URL into your browser’s address bar. Sorry for the inconvenience. Lastly, I would have posted this rant in the comments section of the particular blog post I’m about to discuss, but not surprisingly, comments are closed.

Now that we’ve gotten the disclaimers out of the way, if the site name isn’t enough, the particular blog post on SEOBlackHat I’d like to discuss here provides glaring examples pointing towards the overall shadiness of information you can find from SEOBlackHat and its writers, who I assume “do” black hat search engine optimization.

The post is called “Google Lied About Manually Changes.” Yup, you read that right, “Google Lied About Manually Changes.” I could stop right there. Are these the type of people you want writing your content? I’ll add that the post is the most recent one on the site and was added back in February of 2011. For more on why this is a bad sign, check out this post on breaking the SEO rules.

The post asserts that Google contradicted itself in saying that it has no ability to manually update rankings for a term, and then later saying they ran a test on synthetic queries that involved updating the top result with a page that had nothing to do with the search term. While this sounds like a contradiction, upon closer inspection, the way the information is presented is quite biased. What Google has said in the past is that its [production] algorithm does not feature the ability to manually update rankings. Instead, a change to the algorithm would theoretically need to be made to update listings to accommodate the specific change so improvements made are meaningful and benefit all sites in a similar way.

Does this mean that Google shouldn’t or isn’t allowed to change that algorithm in testing to improve upon it? No. It also doesn’t mean that if tomorrow Google decides it wants to allow for manual updates to their algorithm, they can’t. They’re Google, you’re not. So while yes, folks at SEOBlackHat, the biased slices of information you’ve chosen to present on this topic are in fact contradictions, you are in fact the liars by way of omission. I see this type of trickery a lot and I write about it often. I’m always curious how companies see this sort of behavior as supportive of a long-term business strategy. What do you gain out of accusing Google of lying? What do you gain out of writing this poorly constructed nonsense? I would have asked you on your site, but like I said, you closed the comments. Wonder why…

If you have more examples of shady SEO advice, posts, or sites, PLEASE leave them in the comments below. I’d love to write up a post on them.