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Black Hat SEO

By Janeth | June 2, 2010

Black Hat SEOA couple years ago I almost totally stopped writing because of the grammar police.

Seems every time I write something one of the grammar cops stop by and tell me everything I did wrong. And they always explain how, while my sites look good, my unprofessional writing style has turned them off and they will never buy anything from me.

About the only thing I dislike more than the grammar police are the blackhat police.

I was posting on a forum the other day when someone brought up a link wheel and everyone immediately started in on how building lots of websites and linking those sites back to your own site is blackhat. I tried to explain how this was not the case and the thread was locked and my post removed.

These are SEO’s that feel that their job is to point out and explain what is and what isn’t black hat. To say that building more than one site and linking those sites together is blackhat is stupid to say the least.

Let’s take Ted for example.

Ted works for Bill and Bill owns a shoe website that sells all types of shoes. Ted is the salesperson over the Nike division. Ted is the person you would talk to if you had a question about Nike and were to call the number on the website.

Ted gets a lot of questions about different types of Nike shoes, but is limited to what he can add to the website, because the site is a shopping cart. And in order for Ted to add content to the site it has to be approved by his boss, his bosses’ boss and the marketing department, and then it has to be sent to the web design department. It can take months to have information added to the site.

So…Ted being a good hard working employee decides to start his own blog about Nike shoes. Here he can write answers to the common questions and point potential Nike shoe purchasers to the main shoe website. This saves Ted time and potential clients love it because the information is great and they can find the answers to questions that they would otherwise have had to call about.

The information is so good that people begin linking to the blog from other sites and both the main site and the blog begin to climb in the search engines. The blog is now driving tons of traffic back to the main shoe site. The Nike shoe division grows and begins out selling the other shoe divisions. The owner of the company starts hiring more employees in order to keep up.

Now the company starts getting calls from customers who want to complement them on the Nike blog, so they decide that each shoe division should have its own blog.

The site now has over 50 different blogs and the managers of the different departments are over each blog. Since it is the same company all the blogs link back to the main site, so people can buy the shoes but also link to one another as one shoe might be a better fit than another depending on the type of use.

One day Bill (the owner of the company) visits a SEO forum where he learns that building multiple sites is a blackhat technique. So he rushes to the office fires Ted (for bringing this blackhat technique into his business) and shuts down all the blogs.

As an immediate result sales start to drop and Bill has to start laying people off.

The sad truth is that what he was doing was not a blackhat technique. Had he or the SEO that was pointing out this blackhat technique used a little common sense, they would have seen that Google themselves use more than one website.

But instead of using common sense the blackhat police want to group it all together and call it the same. This is the same mentality that started the zero tolerance policy in schools and it’s the reason most SEO’s fail to rank their own sites, much less their clients.

Instead of trying to figure out how to market a product they are spending all their time on SEO forums pointing out what is and isn’t blackhat. And I was stupid enough to believe that was Google’s job.

A lot of blackhat techniques are whitehat techniques that work when used correctly, blackhats want to abuse the system, automate it, and believe that bulk abuse is the way to go. The truth of the matter is that blackhat techniques want stand up to whitehat techniques when they are run side by side.

Building 50 real blogs, with kickass content, will out deliver a blackhat who bulk builds 150 crap blogs with crap content. But most SEO’s don’t want to spend the time doing that, so they just call the whole thing blackhat.

Blackhat is nothing more than a copout for SEO’s that don’t want to spend the time to do it right.

And while we are talking about BlackHat let’s not forget that according to Google ethical SEO is an SEO that provides useful services for the website owners”, Google goes on to describe the range of what those useful services are: “from writing copy to giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be submitted”.

Writing copy, giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories….I agree that these are a SMALL part of what search engine optimization is. But search engine optimization is about ranking and Google doesn’t even say anything about optimizing the copy to rank.

Sounds like Google has gotten web development and search engine optimization confused.

Google goes on to say, “there are a few unethical SEOs who have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results”. Sounds to me like any search engine optimizer that goes further than the sort of things that Google mentions, or actually optimizes a web page to rank, is unethical. Google clearly views any sort of optimizing to improve rankings as unethical.

Marketers are a ruthless bunch. And the methods each marketer uses are the same methods that separate folks that get excited when they make a sale, from those that are making a living online.

Online marketing is a full contact sport and if you want to be nothing more than a fan that points out what everyone else is doing wrong then you need to get your ass off the field.

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  • Black Hat SEO

Topics: Myths and Crap | 25 Comments »

Posted on 02 June 2010 by Janeth Duque

has written 3 articles for SEO Bullshit

  • http://www.greatwebsitesblog.com/ Barry Adams

    Hear hear. My main client has a network of 7 thematically unrelated sites that all link to one another thoroughly. They all seem to be doing pretty fine in the SERPs – primarily of course because they hired me as their SEO ;). But cross-linking sites is certainly not a default blackhat technique. Actually most blackhat techniques are simply automated versions of whitehat SEO techniques.

  • http://Contempt.me Contempt

    Blackhat's back, baby.

  • http://www.geeksonsteroids.com/ Janeth

    I agree the whole on-topic link counting more than off-topic links is something I’ve not seen in any of the industries I play in.

    A lot of white hat SEO’s are like politicians and grab stuff up and start running with it without ever knowing if it’s true or not.

    I got my butt kicked for three months fighting with competition that was buying links from dictionary sites. It finally dawned on me that the off topic links were kicking my butt and I started getting links from anywhere.

    Now we rank #1 for that keyword.

  • Zak Nicola

    Its all about intent. You can take that same scenario and turn it black.
    Sounds like some people get a bit to caught up in being “gurus” of pristine white hat tactics.

  • http://www.geeksonsteroids.com/ Janeth

    I agree…but when it comes to writing articles, submitting them to article directories and building links that way it becomes white hat.

    It’s like they have a special connection with Google and want to say what is and what isn’t white and black hat.

    I feel quite confident in being able to determine what is and isn’t ethical and don’t need Google or another SEO telling me what is and isn’t.

    Just my two cents

  • http://www.plurk.com/SEOP SEOP

    I don't see anything wrong with having many blogs. As long as you put up quality contents on them and not just use it for link building.

  • http://www.bestchoiceforebooks.com PLR Ebook Store

    I don't believe in “black hat techniques”. All optimizations and link building can be abused. Some will even rank your site higher and slip under the radar of SEs if done correctly (for lack of a better word).

    But what happens when an algorithm is updated and you are caught in the filter? What happens when a keen person checks you out and decides to report the suspected abuse and as a result you receive a penalty or dropped altogether from the index.

    There is moderation and then there is abuse. Link wheels are, in my opinion, moderation if used correctly. But like any other method it can be abused.

  • Steve

    This is exactly what happened to our topically related blogs. About 25 of them actually got a -50 penalty. The blogs were manually updated and did contain quality (and unique) content (and they ranked extremely well). I wouldn't interlink all of them and use affiliate links on at least some blogs (or any sort of link that doesn't pass value) to link back to the main site. Just to be on the safe side.. Even if the intent is good, any highly succesfull strategy runs the risk of being checked heavily by either Google or somebody submitting a spam report..

  • http://www.geeksonsteroids.com/ Janeth

    I know of a site that has been reported time and time again (not by me) for link buying and they continue to rank in the top of the search results.

    I’ve seen forum post after forum post were someone has reported what they feel are unfair tactics yet have never seen Google react to any of them.

    The link buying reached a point that my friend ended up having to do the same in order to compete.

  • http://www.geeksonsteroids.com/ Janeth

    There are a lot of reasons a website can get caught in a filter, are you sure that interlinking was the reason?

  • Steve

    Not 100%. Heavily interlinked sites are however very easy to trace. If one of the blogs is reported as spam, or is caught in a filter for some other reason (you can never really be sure why..) other related sites are easy to discover.

    As far as I know, following link traces is one of the methods Google uses to discover spammy networks.

    Creating a more natural pattern by not interlinking everything with everything is a much safer option. I would combine this with different hosts etc. etc. Just anything to make it look a little less obvious. Besides this, by not interlinking all the blogs you're probably left with some good ones, in case some of them are dropped from the rankings. You don't lose all of them at once.

  • http://www.seo-writer.com David consultant

    Interesting theory in there, Janeth – when a “white hat” technique is automated, it becomes black hat? I am not sure I would go that far. When a white hat technique is automated, it loses effectiveness and if enough people automate it Google will have to tweak its algorithm to counteract it. But I still would not call it black hat. Hidden text, hidden links, cloaking, certain redirects are black hat. After that, it's all pretty gray in my eyes, including what most people call “white”.

  • http://www.geeksonsteroids.com/ Janeth

    Hi David,

    You are correct, maybe I should have called it grey hat instead of black hat. And I also agree that once you automate it you lose just about all of it's effectiveness.

  • http://douglife.info/ Doug Montgomery

    What about freelance designers like myself, who put “designed by” at the bottom of every site I complete? Should I be adding nofollow?

  • http://www.chotrul.com/ Colchester and Essex SEO

    I wouldn't expect Google to really say anything about SEO that actually maps to what it is. After all, they want us to stop SEO'ing and all do PPC instead, as that is their revenue model. Thanks for this article …

  • Johan

    Nice article, people always want to tell others what they are doing wrong, this is always annoying but in some cases even dangerous as pointed out in your example, that poor Ted…

  • http://plrzone.com PLR

    Link wheels are quite powerful, but take so much time to manage. The point of a link wheel is to build many different sites possible similar in topics and then getting them all to link to each other and then link to those in turn with social bookmarks or such.

  • http://www.theexpertseocompany.com Affordable SEO

    thank you thank you thank you. For once somebody actually makes sense with what they are writing about seo.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_KJKSBIASDH2BN6GDY2OR5A7CSQ John Hayward

    A lot of hacking, WhiteHat work properly when using technology, blackhats want to abuse the system to automatically execute it, I believe that most abuse is the way to go.This things make things ranking in the Google quiet easily in the short run is well.

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  • Anonymous

    I feel confident enough to be able to determine what is and is not ethical and do not need Google or another tell me what SEO is and what is not.

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  • Anonymous

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    I would combine this with different hosts etc. etc. Just anything to make it look a little less obvious.

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  • Anonymous

    The  report the suspected abuse and as a result you receive a penalty or dropped altogether from the index.

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  • singh palak

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