Why the Color of Your Cap Matters

- and how your reputation can save your ass when the Google monster comes a callin’! This is a simple one and can be explained in simple math. If you spend your time and money generating 10,000 incoming links using grey hat techniques, and that’s all you’ve got, and Google decides your grey is really a shade or two too close to black, you are screwed. Your percentage of banned or now-useless links is 100%. If you, on the other hand, spend your time and energy creating a legacy for yourself on and around your site, and you do it is such a way that it humanizes who you are in your niche market and the larger world, then two things will happen: 1. You will be far less likely to do anything corresponding to grey hat tactics because you will recognize them for the hijinks that they are. 2. If you do them, either with or without knowing, your link structure will have a percentage of grey/black hat links somewhere less than 100% – hopefully far, far less. Another really important thing happens when you start thinking like this: you realize that you are not here on this earth to blog about products or services. Rather you are here to provide information and education to those who need it. You are here to target that information so that those who need it, find it. And if you make a sale in the process so much the better. Lastly, if Google has a robot that thinks you are up to no good, then they send a pair of eyeballs to check you out, you will be looking slim and pretty and real, and they will cut you some slack. Then it is likely that Google will even train their robots to cut you some slack, too.