Black hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as often mentioned here are tactics used to trick Search Engines (SEs) into ranking a page or website higher in the Search Engines Rank Pages (SERP) for a particular term or keyword than they really deserve. If a site or a page is identified to be trying to manipulate its algorithm it is either penalized - a phenomena known as "sandbox", or de-indexed i.e. completely removed from the SE's index and made unavailable to the internet.
But even such far reaching consequences have not been able to deter black hats. Developers and purveyors of such techniques are often, above average software developers who are keen to stay a step ahead of the ever evolving and certainly improving SE algorithm. This algo is the complicated server side software developed by SEs to determine a pages relevance to "Beef Jerky", it is this algorithm that determines which web pages are most relevant and in what order in the SERPs. It then serves you this list (SERP) starting with the page it considers most relevant.
Black hats are a stealthy yet smart group of people that use their coding genius to reverse engineer the SEs algo to determine what parameters they use to determine what to rank where. They run thousands of tests using complicated sampling and mathematical formulas to discover manipulate-able loopholes in SEs. They then manipulate those parameters on their website to improve their ranking. From the late nineties keyword stuffing to today's Tag and Ping, all are as a result of the work of black hats.
High position in SERPs is literally equivalent to higher incomes. The irony is that one of the strongest drivers of black hat is a development of the most irritable of SEs ; Adsense by Google. Google abhors black hats the most. They react to them swiftly and decisively, yet their advertising program, Adsense, is more than a significant motivation for black hats.
Adsense is an advertising program that rents websites to display adverts for a commission. For every click on that advert the owner of the website makes some money.
With payments that used to be as high as 50 dollars, the equivalent of Ksh 3,500 per click, you can do the math for a site that gets 30,000 visitors per day and has an Adsense click ratio of just 10%. Such payout have been making black hat lucrative despite the risks.
Fear Of The Black Hat
So let's see what black hats do to get traffic:
1. Go for the long tail - black hats do this because it's easier to rank for a 4,5 or even 6 keyword search that has no direct competition than it is to rank for a search phrase that has hundreds of thousands or millions of results.
Of course, spam sites have the advantage of massive numbers of pages, so even if that page only brings one visitor per month it's still enough - spam sites are created in only a couple of hours and usually have from 30 000 pages and up.
But if you keep writing daily (or even more than once a day), it will add up. This brings us to the next point:
2. The money's in the archives - although some visitors will first see the main page of your site, many more will first see one of the inside pages as these will be the ones that come up for specific, long tail searches.
With each page you publish you increase your chances that at least one more visitor will find your site and more importantly, if it's a good resource, it will more than pay for itself by getting backlinks from many different sites that will diversify your inbound links profile.
3. Small degrees of separation - this is one of the best methods for writing new content: if you have a page on a certain subject just write another that has some differences.
For example: you've just written an article on how to promote a site on Digg - now write another on how to promote on Del.icio.us, and yet another on how to promote your site on Slashdot (of course, don't just change the names and URLs, you actually have to change the article a little bit).
Please understand this: if you have a 30 page site don't put up 10 pages that resemble each other very much. By doing this you'll surely trip a duplicate content filter.
4. Comment spam but without the spam - let's face it: black hats are synonymous with spammers. They rely on comment and guestbook spamming to get their huge websites indexed and this proves one thing that i've tested and found to be true: even "no-follow" links have the power to rank and index your site, although most optimizers say these are useless.
What to do: find 10 or 15 blogs that are on the same subject as your site and start contributing with valuable information. Don't spam, don't say "Nice blog!" every time just to get a link! You must actually participate.
5. Create (legitimate) doorway pages - this is a great method for link building and actually getting customers while your site is in the sandbox or not ranking very good.
A very good example is Squidoo.com: it's a very powerful site with lots of link juice that lets you create pages on almost any subject. Start by creating 10 or 12 pages with unique content on various subjects that match your site and then place various links to your site on the Squidoo pages you have created.
Even better, you can actually create a very big network of pages which you can logically structure as a homepage with categories and product pages - it's allowed, encouraged and in the end very good for you.
Now think of other powerful sites on which you can put your content: Blogger, Google Base, Wordpress.com, Xanga, Livespace and many more.
6. Blog and ping - this is very simple and yet a very good method to get indexed fast. Each time you write a new article go to Pingoat.com, put in the name of the article and the url and ping away. You'll be indexed in no time!
Apply these tips now and just watch your rankings improve and traffic increase!
Both Mark Kimathi & Florin Costache are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Mark Kimathi has sinced written about articles on various topics from Soccer, Lose Weight and Site promotion. The author writes for . Mark Kimathi's top article generates over 18100 views. to your Favourites.
Florin Costache has sinced written about articles on various topics from Site Promotion, Finances and SEO Techniques. Florin Costache is the webmaster of a Romanian seo site called which has an optimization guide (. Florin Costache's top article generates over 2900 views. to your Favourites.
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