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Posted By:
SlightlyShadySEO
288 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com)
Category: Other Search Marketing
Includes a seperation of the different breeds of blackhat out there(Guru, Sufficient, and Newbie)
20 Comments
Comments
I found this quote about the newbie interesting:
"If they primarily enjoy the shadiness of the industry, they will eventually drop out of the business, never to be heard from again. If they enjoy the money, and have the intelligence, they will someday enjoy the level of the “sufficient”."
Are you saying that the only reason a newbie will stick with it is for the money, as opposed to enjoying the shadiness of it?
Whitehat a.k.a. "SEO" - employs techniques that both search engines and visitors like. Uses methods that will always work. Never has to look over their shoulder to see if their sites have triggered some spam filter and been banned.
Blackhat a.k.a. "spammer" - always looking for new ways to game the system, is at risk of having their sites and networks banned at any time. Employs methods that search engines explicitly list in their "do not do this" section. Employs methods that ordinary web users would label as "spam".
@Burgo: Yes, I am. There's about a million people who drop in and out of the various blackhat forums, who are looking just for the 1337 hacker value. They want to know how to get competitors dropped, how to break into whichever account is popular that day, everything like that. They like the name "blackhat", and not the money. And DEFINITELY not the love of automation/systems that blackhats enjoy
@g1smd: Wow. Closed minded much? Whitehat aka "Sheep" is more like it, with few exceptions(some do exist, but most are just sheep. Head over to digitalpoint to understand. I'm proud to say there are many whitehats on sphinn I respect). And there are no "methods" google likes. They want organic. No buy links, they're definitely not fans of self-submission(although reality prevents them from penalizing this) to directories or news sites. They want the information to spread forth and multiply based on the quality.
And methods that will "work forever"? Wow. Take a look lately. Who's been penalized by Google? I'll give you a hint. With a few exceptions, it wasn't me. Whitehats were the targets. And they got stung.
Blackhat SEO can exist completely independent of "spam" as you call it. And we do not always "look over our shoulders" as one of two conditions always exists
1)We have enough sites to not care. If I have 400 subdomains/domains out there, you can bet your arse I don't care if you report one.
2)We're good enough at it that it doesn't matter. I have sites out there google KNOWS were link spammed for, and KNOWS are webringed, and they're still ranking. They survive manual review. So I'm NOT looking over my shoulder.
Last point: ordinary web users do not consider anything related to search engines "spam". They consider e-mail spam. Everything else, as far as their concerned, is organic.
Well said. Would this prevailing myth that "white hat means safe" would finally go away. Then again, what would all those whiners' forums have to blare about all day? :)
"If it ain't automated, it ain't black hat" is the going adage - and yes, lots of self-declared bhs simply fall off on that score. If all people care about is the mystique, they'll either have loads of fun sans profits, or they'll suffer really badly if they happen to pump tons of money into an approach they don't really understand in all its intricacy and complexity.
Because at the end of the day, black hat is about strategized automation, which obviously requires quite a bit more than a smattering of vague knowledge about what SEO is or should be about.
As for "spam" - that's another inflationary term the search engines and their webmaster lackeys have blown up beyond proportion to make it essentially meaningless. By way of an illustration, look at all those parked domains Google favors so much, featuring lots of AdSense links and no other content, certainly nothing of informational value except ads - if a black hat operator uploads them, they're "spam", if registrars and bigtime AdSense publishers like major domainers do the same, it's "organic", haha. Old carrot.
Not so sure about that marijuana bit, though - I know quite a few bhs who won't touch the stuff (or, at the very least: no longer, maybe having gone for it bigtime earlier in life), same as myself, preferring a clear mind. So this may actually be an age and/or generation thing.
haha it very well might be. You're a syndk8 boy though. You've seen the discussions. And the avatars. And the nicknames. And the smiley faces for that matter...
If you're referring to sites utilising paid links for PageRank getting whacked for six, then I could have told you years ago that paid links for PageRank would become a big target once enough people had gamed that system.
It all started out with some outfit called SearchKing. The writing was already on the wall. I would never have called paid links for Pagerank a whitehat exercise. Don't tell me that people really thought they could get away with this indefinitely. LOL.
... and enter Massa :)
There are no greyhats. You're either black or white. You either do blackhat stuff or you don't.
If you do it part time, or on certain sites, then that's still black.
It would be like a burglar or mugger saying, "I'm not a real criminal, I only rob people a couple of times per year, not every day".
Would your clients care if it's there site that was reported ?
It appears to me that blackhats don't seem to care much about their clients.
Interesting article, but the white hat definition is very much lacking. It needs to have a lot more added to it, probably similar to the black hat definition in that there are a variety of types of white hats.
The current one in the article isn't even close to being accurate for most white hats, but might be one particular type.
@Jill:I reincarnate it, improving the whitehat area. I need to explore it more. I think you're right
@DannyR:We mostly don't HAVE clients. Mostly BHs work for themselves. Or otherwise, they at least set up seperate sites for BH work, and keep the WH site seperate.
The only real difference between white hat and black hat SEO is automation/scalability.
White hat: You write one page at a time. You build brick by brick. You spend X hours/SEO client. That type of business model does not scale, especially if you're a one-man operation.
Halfdeck, I believe that is an excellent simplification of it. I think it goes a little bit more broad, but that's a good analysis in a nutshell.
posted by SlighShadySEO
Isn't it so that last year's blackhat #1 named SEO inc got banned together with a lot of his clients ? The same happened to Tribal (in the Netherlands) and their clients. There's a lot more exemples i could give.
Innocent people out there read BH crap on a daily basis. BH's rub eachother's back and go spread how good they are and how easy it is to achieve high rankings with minimal effort. When one gets busted à la Mr. Wall recently, they hide in their dark corners and go down the Google-is-evil-road.
@Halfdeck: if you build a skyscraper overnight, you can be sure it will collapse with the very first storm. Build your house brick by brick, give it a solid basis and it will survive.
Furthermore i find it rather normal that you have to work for the money.
It's a business model that works for the electrician, the plumber, the programmar, etc.
What's making you think that an SEO is an exception to that ? Of course, in either profession there is just one rule... be honest to the client, don't be lazy and work hard for the money
There are some unethical companies out there, yeah. Surprise surprise. I don't like that, I don't approve of that, and there's nothing I can do about it. Nowhere in my blog do I say it's easy. I tell people how to dodge obvious ban setups, and I also tell them it might change. Almost every risky thing says make a NEW site, that you haven't worked hard on yet.
You think BH skyscrapers are built overnight? That it's the lazy way out? You should see my code. Thousands upon thousands of lines of it. Generation, time release algorithms, different linking schemes. Different ways of gathering data, combining it, altering it, classifying it. It's not the "easy way out". It's the complicated as all hell way out, but it also happens to be a lot more efficient.
Re:There are some unethical companies out there, yeah. Surprise surprise. I don't like that, I don't approve of that, and there's nothing I can do about it.
Warning people about them could be something. But well, the first part of your sentence is a good start.
Re:You think BH skyscrapers are built overnight? That it's the lazy way out? You should see my code.
I wasn't referring to your work. I don't know what you do and how you do it. Never felt any need to look into your work.
My reply was directed at Halfdeck who wrote : "White hat: You write one page at a time. You build brick by brick. You spend X hours/SEO client".
Yes, that statement makes me think that some believe that not every client deserves X hours of work.
Ah, ok. Sorry for jumping on you there. I've been taking a lot of flack lately for the stuff I publish, and I'm afraid it's mady my temper a little hotter than normal. I'll cool it down.
*** set up seperate sites for BH work, and keep the WH site seperate ***
Mr Wall could maybe have done with that advice a while back...
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/anti-google-claims-to-reply-or-not/#comment-116573
"if you build a skyscraper overnight, you can be sure it will collapse with the very first storm."
DannyR, have you tried spamming the engines?
A while back, I spent several months on a white hat site (back when I knew nothing about SEO). The site ended up 99% supplemental. It still managed to generate a constant stream of sales, but the traffic level maxed out around 1,000/day and most of that didn't come from Google.
Then I spent 2 hours on a spam script. 30 days later, my crap site is pulling 3-5K uniques/day, landing page CTR at 1:4, and converting at 1:300~1:750. ($30 - $150/day). The domain stayed active for 3 months.
Personally, I prefer building white hat sites to spam. But I'm not going to tell you there are no short cuts in online marketing. Google, for example, does not build brick by brick. Google understands the importance of automation and scalability.
No, i've never tried spamming the engines.
Never felt any need to. My white hat way of optimizing is working just fine. Ok, it takes a lot of work, and patience sometimes, but it works... and not just for 3 months or so. The longer the sites are online, the better they are performing.