SEO Speed Sight Forum

Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO is a series of methods that leverage the search engine loopholes to gain high ranking for their website. This includes violating search engine guidelines, and usually the black hatter will create spam links or content to trick the search engine to rank their targeted page on page 1 of the selected keyword. Black hat methods are widely used, but most people tend to describe these methods as immoral practice because of the potential of bringing harm to other websites or breaking the rules of those websites.

White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO is a series of methods that will increase website / web page ranking naturally by following search engine guidelines - which excluded any artificial backlink building, and usually white hatter will create some good content or free tools to attract organic backlinks. They will distribute / promote the link bait pages to authority network, when people find these pages useful, they will start to spread them in their own blogs, forums or websites, hence backlinks are created naturally.

Is Backlink Building Consider a Black Hat Method ?

Absolutely! Strictly speaking, Google doesn't allow any form of link building. It is against their webmaster guidelines: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356 However, who don't build backlinks today?

Although Google had strict rules about this, but they don't have many ways of detecting link building by the owner, and if they can't prove that, they won't and can't take this seriously, because the webmaster will start messing with the search result by creating tons of bad backlinks to their competitors' websites!

Are You Saying That Black Hat is No Good and Should Be Avoided At All Time ?

No, no, that's not what I meant at all..!

Let's be realistic here; When we look at tons of money-making websites, how many are promoting their websites to get natural backlinks? Who would want to naturally link to your money-making sites without any benefits in return? You'll be scratching your heads trying to create attractive content and tools!

Did Google really penalize all these websites? Everyday we still find those websites on the (SERP) Search Engine Result Page, why did Google still rank them? IMHO, as long as those websites have value to the search engine user, Google will include them into the SERP!

Are You Saying It's OK To Spam The Search Engine?

Yes and No. Google constantly monitoring High Value keywords that are heavily spammed, and they analyst spammer's technique to effectively counter them so that most of the SERP will remains clean and useful to the SE user.

Here are my rules of using Black Hat SEO for long term result:

1. Stay away from lazy aggressive spam methods. This kind of methods is easy to see the result, and they are easily spread through the Black Hat community, hence it won't last when the majority of the Black Hatter starts to use the same method to spam the search engine.

2. Avoid Search Engine filters and cover your tracks. Here are some of the filters to avoid:

a) Unique content on your new site - You don't want your newly created website to host only duplicated content, you need at least 5 ~ 10 pages of 400 words unique content to gain trust from the search engine.

b) Authoirty backlinks to your site - When I talked about authority, usually they means:

• High PR (PR4+)
• At least 5 years old
• From Gov or Edu domain

c) Evenly distributed backlinks between homepage vs inner pages - Do not send all your backlinks to the homepage, the best practice is 50/50.

d) Mix different link types - Don't rely on just one type of backlinks, mix directory submission, bookmarking, profile links, blog network posts and other type of backlinks to your site.

e) Maintain good link velocity - Try to avoid backlinks that have a short life span, always make sure your site gain backlinks more than it loses. You want Google to have the impression your website is getting more and more popular.

f) Never optimise your onpage keyword when running the backlink campaign - You do not want the search engine to think that you are manipulating them, optimising your page while running the bakclink campaign will just confirm that! So do not change your web page content when running the backlink campaign.


So, If We Follow These Rules, We Don't Need Good Content or White Hat SEO Anymore?

No, that's not what I meant. You still need to create some value for your visitors, or Google will eventually remove your site from their search engine!

I have seen many sites with good backlinks but thin content, Google seems to hate this kind of sites. We can see this trend coming when Google first slap thin affiliate sites from using adword. That's why PPC doesn't really work for thin affiliate sites anymore.


The Importance of Implementing White Hat SEO

If you want to build a solid long term online business, you just can't ignore the White Hat SEO.

Here's what you need:

1. Great content that actually benefits your visitors, don't write content only for search engine, optimise the content towards helping your visitors and gain trust.

2. Create link bait content pages with attractive topics, and promote them through social network or forums, make sure they are easy to understand.

3. Create link bait tool pages with easy and desirable software or tools, promote them through social network or forms.

4. Write good articles and syndicate them through the article network, find out what sites downloaded and distribute your article, contact the webmasters and offer them more content. You are not only building natural backlinks, if your article is good enough, it actually pulls visitors to your website!

5. Find related blogs in your niche, offer them some guest posts or as a guest writer to draw traffic from their websites. Before doing that, it is better to well prepare your website with good content or opt-in, so that you'll be able to keep the visitors on your site as long as possible.

It Seems Very Complicated, Can We Skip Some of The White Hat Methods For a Niche Sniper Site?

Sure, the key here are the good content and nice layout. The more Whilte Hat Methods you implemented on your site, the better. However, it is not realistic to implement all for Niche Sniper Sites.

IMPORTANT: I have concluded my 5 years experiences of Black Hat & White Hat strategy in this newest ebook: Nuclear Traffic Storm, FREE for download!

Its a very sensitive topic but imo you cannot rank a site without doing Blackhat SEO unless you are "Wikipedia" hahahaha

I mean even if a SEO agency claims they don't do BH SEO techniques they cannot build 500 links a day let alone thousands in a week.

Hi Ash, welcome to the forum.

Actually there are methods to promote your website using pure white hat without any artificial backlink campaigns... one of the most inspiring method is Link Liberation : http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/my-link-building-course-for-2009-link-liberation

This course actually teach you the proper way to attract white hat backlinks, and how to scale it up and find proper channel to use content as link bait, and distribute them to white hat sites.

Another way is offer guest post on authority sites, provide them good content to draw traffic and gain backlinks...

I totally agree with you. However, I still believe there is a way to use white hat completely, and you still don't have to spend a lot of money, but time - YES.

My strategy of leveraging both is - Create good content, optimize them with SEO SILO, and backlinks until they rank for traffic. However, if I'm gonna build authority site, I will create few link bait pages, these will be my main white hat backlink source.

I'm glad you had found the best method for your sites. My experience is similar, and I hate continuously building backlinks, that's why I will implement long term strategy using link bait pages.

Another thing, Kim Roach told me using Guest Blogging and few other white hat method seems to draw traffic a lot faster. I think you can get thousands of visitors from blogging for few authority blogs, and your site's content must be good enough to get the first initial visitors to start spreading them for you... although not an easy path, it sounds right.

We don't do white hat promotion for clients, unless they have a bigger budget, I only do this for my own authority site.

white hat seems to be something almost no one does.  When you look at the first page of google for a keyword, you will see all the top 10  have done back linking campaigns.  So looks to be like there's nothing google can do on this.  Alot of times they are big sites, but still they did some blackhat techniques.  In the end, their blackhat activities helped them get real whitehat backlinks, so I guess it's a win win situation for them.