Naughty Black Hat Stuff!

[clivemcg]

I bet just reading the title of this post sphincters were tightened. Good, now let's move on...

So: I've thrown a few 'niche' sites together, fully optimised them (threw in a few Black Hat techniques) set up double Domain Names ( one's the throw-away with the redirect on it)

Added 'Adsense' to all the sites and it's starting to kick in. I've yet to see how successful I'll be on the affiliate side of things but it's a start and my expectations are high.

Yes I'm possibly your worst nightmare, a guy that knows his way around an HTML page, who's prepared to explore the Dark Side ~ and I am 'Legion'

I've previously tried to get Forum Members to come out of their shells on this issue - specifically 'BlackHat' pros and cons - but have always found a sort of 'Golly-Gosh' attitude in that no-one seems to be prepared to address the issue other than to say "No!"

Well here's the opportunity! Sign in under a fake identity if you are that worried about what others may think (why is that by the way? Are we going to be reported to the Cyber Headmaster?)

The fact is that the Web is full of people looking for shortcuts to make a quick buck and to sit back and say " Tut, tut" isn't really addressing the issue.

Mr or Ms Moderator: what's the way around this? Is an anonymous area possible?

[nullvariable]

I guess my genereal perception of sites that use "black hat" SEO is that they are worthless. I almost never see any useful content. They tend to be IMHO not much better than spyware. They force sites with good content but poor SEO down in the rankings with out providing any benefit to the end user. They tend (not all but most) to be sites with lots of adsense and affiliate links but nothing of any real substance. I've read plenty about black hat stuff and I've never found any real reason to do it. Sure maybe you can make some cash for awhile but in the end the frustrated enviornment that creates will turn against it. But hey no one really listens to me anyway :D


NV

[Linda Buquet]

Hi NV,

I'm listeneing to ya and agree with all your points.

clivemcg,
You seem to want to evoke some type of heated debate.

I'm not biting.

My philosophy is very simple. Marketing with integrity helps everyone win.

Going to the dark side of marketing on any level almost always results in new tougher search algos that make it hard for ALL marketers to get ranked, more ad blockers that block normal ads and even text links and more anti-spyware apps that block or eat EVERYONES affiliate cookies.

Yes some people will put on the black hat for a quick buck. But most of them are stupid and short sighted, not realizing how much of the stuff they pull today will come back to bite them and everyone else in the pocketbook later.

[sdadesky]

Hi guys,

I don't disagree that the black hats are undermining the usefulness of the web and making things worse for everyone.

What I am not sure of is that they are not winning the battle... They're like cockroaches. You kill (blacklist) one and a zillion others crop up.

As the search engines adjust their algorithms to take the latest "tricks" into account, new "tricks" become doable. It's almost like the efforts to stop email spam. Have any really been successful?

I run a travel site which does some really nice things, like comparing the rates (with their permission) of a couple of the top search engines, amagamating their content,linking it to new pictorial content and user reviews, and allowing search from the Google mapping api, etc.

Yet although my pages have been extensively spidered by Google and Yahoo, the relative SERP's are still compartively poor.

In comparison, I reviewed one guys site - who's only claim to fame is that he joined a link farm. Has be been penalized? By a position of 22,300 in Alexa and a steady flow of traffic. He's maintained that for 4 months now. I don't believe in pointing fingers - so I won't reveal the guy's url - but I KNOW that's all he's done. The site is really poor from a user perspective, just an endless series of drill down country links, ending at a pitiable link to an existing affiliate travel program. I can not imagine he makes a lot of money off selling travel, but he told me he does well on the adsense click throughs.


So maybe he will eventually be blacklisted? Two days later he'll have reregistered on another isp under another name, with all the same links.

In the meantime, seeing that he makes a cosy $700-1500 a month from this site, he'll probably have launched a dozen others, maybe in a different field altogether.

Eventually, I think all of this will force a resurgence of the "human-controlled" directories, which are far more difficult to fool.