There is No Difference Between a Whitehat and Blackhat SEO
Recently I visited the Affiliate Summit East and got to meet some Black Hat SEOs from WickedFire. I won’t go into a review on the summit in this blog, but I will talk about some interesting conversations I had with the black hats. First of all, I have to admit conferences like these are not great because of the things you “learn” but are great because you finally get to meet the people you read about. There is just something about shaking another persons hand that a blog, article, email, or anything else can’t top.
I considered myself as white hat as it gets. My goal was to grow a “legitimate” publishing business. I had a whole business plan laid out where I would hire staff writers and product blog style content. I figured with my white hat SEO tactics and original content it shouldn’t be tough to start making some serious scratch. Well I was dead wrong and the blackhats have helped me join the dark side. Let me explain white whitehat and blackhat are the same thing.
Search Engine Optimization is not rocket science. Realistically anyone who wants to learn can learn 80% of everything you need to know in 6 months. The last 20% is not even worth studying because the return on investment on learning it is not worth it (semantic indexing and other shit). If you do not know how SEO works here is about 60% of it. Pick a term you want to rank for in Google and get more links with that term to point to a page on your site than the number one guy.
How you get those links is the only place where blackhats differ from whitehats. A blackhat understands the power of technology and will leverage it to his advantage. A whitehat uses the power of community to get the same effect. Let me explain using an example of Social Media.
Lets say a whitehat wants to gain some social media links to get his client or his site noticed by using social networking/bookmarking/news. He will create a profile on these sites and proceed to make “friends”. He will then start “participating” in the community to learn how the different sites work. He will then craft the perfect piece of linkbait, usually something outrageous to get those communities to take notice and link to the content. He will then submit it to the social networks and get a bunch of backlinks.
A blackhat also understands the power of social media. The difference is that instead of wasting his time trying to participate by making stupid comments or making fake friends, he simply creates 100 friends and a bot to do the work for him. Automation is the name of the game of blackhats. They are no more spamming the system than a whitehat, the difference is in how they proceed to market their content.
The content being marketed is what results in SPAM, not the method used to try to gain visibility online.
Blackhats you won, I am officially joining the dark side WAAHAHAHAHA!
9 comments
Welcome ;)
Well…a BH will often not care of the source of a link because it will provide a temporary boost in rank, though not stable. A WH will go for quality over quantity. But yes, whether adding friends manually or with a bot, the goal is the same: traffic/links.
“The last 20% is not even worth studying because the return on investment on learning it is not worth it (semantic indexing and other shit).”
[satire] Not worth the investment, but willing to play with semantics to claim whitehat and blackhat are the same thing?[/satire]
Eh, I just figure it’s about how close you play to the Google “rules” rather than how you acquire links.
What about all the onsite tricks blackhats employ?
You know them - redirects, cloaking, and the use of CSS to either hide or make content less visible to the human than to the search engine.
Then there is form injection, blog spamming, and duplicate content.
Links are one, but not the only black hat tactic.
agreed, but links are by far the most powerful and most important
Haha most amusing. I wonder if any black hat SEOs actually wear black hats?
seriously though… doing is Whitehat is the best thing to do if you want to build a quality site that will last a long time. If you can’t wait three years to do that…
“Haha most amusing. I wonder if any black hat SEOs actually wear black hats?”
It’s my avatar for a reason. ;)
And yes, I wear one every day.
GSS - Pleasure talking to you on a yacht at like 11 PM with a vodka/sprite in my hand, haha. It was quite a fun night. :)
Oh BTW GSS - you missed a ‘n’ for Contempt Me in your blogroll ;)
Fixed it thanks for the heads up.
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