Let’s say for my little example here that you have a website that sells sporting goods.  Things like exercise machines, footballs, those silly socks soccer players play, etc..

Your domain is something like:  Greatsportgoods.com  (from this point on we will call this your ‘main domain’)

You’ve got thousands of products, and of course you don’t have the funds for branding so that when someone thinks “sporting goods” your name pops in their head (read up on how much amazon spent to get in your head and you’ll get what I mean).

So you start trying to get yourself optimized for your keywords - which are probably things like:

Soloflex machine, football cleats, football socks, etc…

Let me break it to you - you will NEVER rank for all those because ALL your other pages on the site aren’t about those products.  In fact your going to have a hard time ranking well for lot’s and lot’s of semi-competitive words.

You aren’t doing anything wrong. It’s just how it is.

The White Hat way:

At this point the white hat guy starts fiddling with url structures, writing 100’s or 1000’s of articles.  Building up links slowly.  Eventually he ranks for a few of those terms.  But in reality it’s always going to be uphill battle.

The Black Hat way:

The black hat guy starts going out and buying LOT’s of domains.  Things like Greatfootballsocks.com, Greatsoloflexmachine.com, etc…  He puts a few pages up with the main goal of pushing traffic and links back up towards the soloflex page on the “main domain”.  We call these sites the “foundation” sites and they push ranking, links, and value up to the main domain.

He wins in the long run because those words in that domain name matter.  He doesn’t have to work as hard, or get as many links to rank.

Did he do anything wrong?  Well nope.  (not yet)

To build up links to those “foundation” sites he could easily go a little further and build sites that push links and ranking to those foundation sites. A little linking towards all those sites - or some little viral actions on the sites could easily take care of the linking issues to get them ranked.  But hey that’s what bookmarking and your own network is for.

Did he do anything wrong?  Well nope — but wait.  We did enter into what many ‘white hat’ seo guys think is black hat territory.

In reality the white hat guys time, effort, and money went towards building up other peoples property.  The Black Hat guy spent the time building up his own little empire.

Guess who wins at the end of the decade?  The black hat guy…. as long as he doesn’t go to far in link building.

There is a stigma that if you don’t do things by the “book” (who’s book) that your wrong and evil.  At the end of the day though both these guys accomplish the same things — except the black hat guy has more to work with that is his own.

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