There’s No Crying in Black Hat SEO
March 17th, 2006 by Michael Gray in Grayhat SEO, SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
SEO is clearly an emerging industry every day more and more people decide to try their hands at learning techniques to increase their rankings. However many of these newbies give in to the dark side thinking it’s faster, quicker, and easier. However many of these same people end up getting their websites or their clients websites banned. So for those of you who want to dabble in the black arts here are few tips:
- Don’t employ risky techniques on websites that you don’t want to lose. There’s a reason black hats have hundreds of domains.
- Don’t link together more websites than you are wiling to lose. If all of your sites are linked together and you get a hand ban don’t think they aren’t going to look at a few other sites you linked to or are linked to you.
- Don’t link your company website to your clients websites.
- Don’t link your clients website to your website.
- Don’t link your clients websites together. If one gets banned and they check through all of them and ban them all, you are going to have more than one angry person calling you in the morning.
- If you do client work set a fake SEO company website. If you get a client banned and need to give up your SEO company when you file for reinclusion, it’s good to have an established SEO company website in your back pocket to act as a sacrifice.
- The last and most important is don’t be a whiner. If you are breaking the rules be prepared to pay the consequences. It will suck losing a site that was bringing in a couple of G’s a month, but if you play heavily in the dark arts you will get burned from time to time. I’d even go so far as to say you aren’t a real black hat until you’ve had something banned. So go to the pub drink yourself silly, and then get back to work the next day, hopefully having learned something.
Sphere It
March 17th, 2006 at 10:33 am
I like your last point the best. Essentially, giving everyone the green light to put on the black hat, and have some fun. My advice is to experiment with a throwaway domain you don’t care about. You can learn a lot from experimentation:-)
March 17th, 2006 at 10:46 am
Exactly play and do some R&D. Now having only one test domain is iffy, it’s better to take a few and establish a “most likely outcome”.
March 17th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Um… don’t do black hat SEO in the first place? [Sorry to be a party pooper]
March 17th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
If you don’t have the tolerance for high risk tactics, obviously stay away from them. However I think there’s a lot of knowledge to be gained by pushing the algo in ways it doesn’t handle well and watch the results.
March 17th, 2006 at 4:14 pm
Love this post, Michael. Especially the part about “sacrificing” an SEO company
March 19th, 2006 at 1:24 am
[...] De citit: SEOmoz, wolf-howl.com [...]
April 12th, 2006 at 6:31 am
[...] If your breaking the rules don’t be a whiner ya nancy! [...]
September 28th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
So lets say youdesign and promote sites, does that mean you shouldnt link back to your main site (as is usuallythe case when you link”site designed by” in the footer)
? ?/?
will this be seen as dodgy link building?
September 28th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
well I’d create a link at the bottom of each page that linked to a page on the same domain and from that page link to my site. Get’s the link on a relevant page without looking spammy.
I would only do that if I was designing the site, SEO’ing the site i would not want the ink on there at all
February 21st, 2007 at 12:00 pm
It goes beyond ‘no whining’ –which was the absolute first TOS of WmW back in its heyday, btw.
The true rule is “Don’t bleed on the carpet, kid.” Which means you’re not going to whine AND you’re not going to mess up the playing field for someone else if you get your arm ripped off.