Posts About ‘black hat’

The Slippery Slope of Black Hat CRO, Dark Patterns and Manipulative Interface Design #ConvCon

Conversion Conference London 2012 Logo

Many websites across the Internet have either purposefully, or accidentally, fallen into the trap of employing black hat CRO tactics to trick users into converting. This is something that Dr. Harry Brignull User Experience Consultant for 90percentofeverything.com refers to as ‘Dark Patterns’. This talk takes time to explore examples of how websites use these manipulative techniques and also explores the notion that; while these tactics may work in the short term, as usability experts, brand managers or even website owners, we must look beyond this – toward protecting our brand and developing a long term strategy.

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SMX East 2012 New York – Day 1 #SMX

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This was my first time to attend SMX East and I was really pleased to attend the SEO and link building sessions. The sessions were Keyword Research and Copywriting, Surviving Penguins, Pandas and Other SEO Beasts, SEO is an investment and SEO Beware: Black Hat Tactics To Avoid and Be Wary of.

Here is summary of each of the four from the first day of SMX East.. (more…)

Dark Patterns: how “Black Hat design” can influence behavior

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Earlier this month I visited Brighton SEO, Annabel reported on that in two posts last week. There was one presentation at Brighton SEO which deserves a little bit more attention. Harry Brignull is in his dayjob Senior User Experience Designer at Clearleft. Outside of his job he started a website called darkpatterns.org. On that website he ‘exposes’ design tricks.

We all know about Black Hat SEO, but did you know there was such a thing as Black Hat Design? You are probably looking at it every day and when you’ve seen Brignull’s presentation you will realize that you run into Black Hat Design every single day. And the frightening thing: it could indeed be useful for website owners… (more…)

How SEO is a lot like Poker

Recently, when reading Victoria Coren’s wonderful book on poker For Richer For Poorer, I realised that poker and SEO have a lot in common. Bear with me, this analogy isn’t as artificial as you may imagine.

Poker is a card game that involves certain skills, techniques, and a bit of luck, to win more money in a game than your competitors.

Search engine optimisation is a profession that involves certain skills, techniques, and a bit of luck, to help a site rank higher than its competitors in search engine results.
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