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If you are a webmaster and own many websites like I do then you probably want to know the best SEO techniques to get your site ranked and get more traffic. Well, there are 2 routes with SEO and that’s blackhat and whitehat SEO. Which one you are going to choose is totally up to you, but I want to give you some insights to help you make the right decision. So let’s talk about blackhat SEO first…

Blackhat SEO

What does it really mean? Blackhat SEO means that you are bending the rules to get your site to the top of the search engine rankings. Usually those techniques violate Google’s webmaster guidelines and if discovered by Google or other search engines then you will get banned and deindexed from the search results. I guess that’s the basic idea of blackhat seo.

Here are a few techniques that are considered blackhat:

1. Doorway Pages (Cloaking) - It’s a tactic to trick the search engines that you have lots of content pages on your site. Those pages are used to redirect the visitors (search engine user) to another page or so called money page where you are trying to sell or promote something.

Here is how cloaking works

The basic concept is that you have a script running on your server that generates those cloaked pages automatically. When the search engine spider or Googlebot visits the site it’s being presented with pages that have lots of relevant content and optimized for varies keyword phrases. When those pages get indexed in Google they will usually obtain good rankings and start driving traffic to your site. When the visitor clicks on the link from the organic search results he/she doesn’t see the original page that Googlebot has seen. The cloaking script automatically detects that it’s a real person and redirects them to totally different page or your money page.

I have to warn you though. If someone discovers this activity on your site then you can say bye bye to that domain name. It will usually get banned within days once the cover is blown.

Some cloakers got smart and register so called throw-away domain names for cloaking purposes only. This means they keep indexing those cloaked sites and redirect visitors to a whole different domain name, so if the site where the cloaker is installed gets banned their money site is safe, but that’s not always true either.

So basically you need to create cloaking sites faster than they are being banned so you can keep constant flow of targeted traffic to your website or landing page.

2. Buying Links - This in fact is a big problem for Google and other search engines. The reason for that is because it’s ALMOST undetectable. The concept here is simple. If you want top search engine rankings then you need lots of backlinks to your website. If your niche is highly competitive then you need basically thousands of them. Some niches like for example financial, mortgage, credit report, insurance are insanely competitive, and it would require some long term content development and link building campaign. If you have the budget you can buy links from other authority sites which is against Google’s terms of service. If this was allowed then any company with a lot of money could dominate the search engine rankings by simply buying links from other high PR and authority sites. Google has managed to keep up with this by integrating some changes to their algorithm, but the problem still exists on massive scale because in reality you would need a real human editor to visit every site to see if you are buying links or if you are gaining them in the natural way.

3. Keyword Manipulation - This tactic used to work about 7-8 years ago and now is being used to trick Adwords for higher quality score more than SEO. The basic idea is to insert keywords on your site and hide it by making them very small and not readable to human eye or just changing the color of the text font to white on the white background. Google has pretty much crushed this. Their spider can easily detect this on your page so I wouldn’t recommend this at all.

4. Cross-linking - This has been going on for years and still is quite effective if you don’t get caught The idea is to create many niche sites on different IP addresses and link them all to get higher rankings. It’s against Google terms of service to link to your own sites within the same niche. This is why Google has become a domain name registrar and now has access to WHOIS information so they can see which domain names you own. So if you are using this technique you better mask your WHOIS data.

5. Scraping Content - Scraping other sites for content is actually becoming more and more popular. Most of the people that use it try to monetize those sites using Adsense. The idea is that you have a script installed on your server that automatically pulls content from other sites and creates pages on your website. This falls into the duplicate content category, but it looks like Google really doesn’t care much about this anymore. The sites with scraped content usually get filtered out off the search results, but somehow they still get indexed and manage to pull some traffic. So if you use this on massive scale you could actually see some great results as far some affiliate income.

6. Hijacking - This one is actually pretty evil and you wouldn’t want this to happen to you, but here is how it works. The hijacker goes and creates a 302 redirect on some established site which gets indexed in the serps while the original site gets deindexed. So basically if some company has an affiliate program and you want to monetize on their traffic from search enignes without doing any work you would go and create this kind of redirect and your page would appear in place of the original domain name. Of course you would redirect through your own affiliate link. This is one bad technique that should not be used ever.

There are many other black hat SEO techniques like link spamming, building link farms and more.

Black Hat SEO is not for everyone. It usually delivers fast and quick results but it’s not a long term business model that will continue to grow. You need to constantly tweak and put up new sites to keep the momentum going. I have done some black hat seo in the past when I first started, and I know what kind of risk is involved. I was constantly under stress and hoping that my sites will survive another day

I switched from black hat to white hat SEO and I like it much better. Some people never make the switch and stay underground…lol

Anyway, let’s take a look at White Hat SEO and what it’s all about.

WhiteHat SEO

Whitehat SEO delivers slower results but much more stable and steady income. The idea is to provide high quality content that gets noticed. If you put out great content it will accomplish 3 things - get higher rankings and gain authority plus get natural links back to your site.

The problem why so many people struggle with Whitehat SEO is because it takes a lot of work at the beginning without and results at all. For the first month or 2 you will be creating content without getting too much traffic or generating any substantial income. Most people quit because of that and then try black hat stuff.

Anyway, I highly recommend that you try to build a stable business and only use White Hat SEO. You will not have to worry about getting banned or losing your site. Once you get to the point where you are making decent money from it then it will be much much easier than any black hat technique. In fact you can make more money with doing a legitimate business than trying to trick the search engines.

Hope this post helped you understand the whole concept better, so you can decide for yourself which way you are going to choose.

Feel free to post your comments below with your opinion.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 6:39 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.