Black Hat “REALLY” isn’t evil. It’s just smart!
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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November 8th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Nice post,
but those foundationsites have the same domainowner as the “make money site”, wouldn’t google discount these links because the domains are owned by the same person? Or shouldn’t I care about it?
cya
Dennis
November 8th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Dennis,
This is something we cover in the “30 day” posts as well. But it’s really as simple as having your mother, sister, wife, brother, etc… be the registrar on some of your domains.
You should care about it – but not be obsessive or anything if you aren’t doing anything wrong (by wrong I mean illegal, or scrapping content).
November 10th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
I can’t agree with you more. I love how you keep things legit and legal. A few minutes over at blackhatworld is enough to make me sick. Seems like there is a large segment of people who think that they should lie, cheat, steal, and hurt others just to make a buck.
Your guides always show me a SMART way.
November 15th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Interesting article. I’ve looked at many websites that rank well will related but diverse content.
While I agree the domain name will give a competitive advantage if it contains keywords, however the sports product site should develop some synergy, or I would expect it to.
Good food for thought. I’ll keep my eye out for such an example.
November 16th, 2008 at 12:13 am
SO NICE that you recognize that there are gals and guys out here.
This has been a pet peeve for decades, and it is nice to know that you are conscious of the small things. Yeah for the good Folks!!
November 16th, 2008 at 12:26 am
Blackhat is certainly ok, it’s just smart marketing.
As mentioned, outright spam, theft and sabotage is not.
I was reading another blog mentioning that it’s “standard practice” to sabotage your competitor to outrank them in the SE’s.
If this is true, perhaps we should start by taking money out of *their* pockets first – if it’s such an OK thing to do…
November 18th, 2008 at 5:12 am
I like the way you write ed, there is always a way to achieve your end result without going totally over to the dark side.
A walk along the line once in a while doesn’t hurt, just don’t cross it.
Of course then the question is , Who decides where the line is?
November 18th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Regarding the domain owner issue, what about registrars like 1and1.com that give free private domain service (whois blocking)?
November 19th, 2008 at 12:04 am
I try my best to stay away from 1 and 1 for everything
– I do use namecheap that offers free whois blocking as well.
However, it’s pretty much accepted that Google can still “see” you – so you aren’t really hiding anything from them. It is a good way to minimize spam and hide yourself from the casual searcher.
I’ve got a number of sites I wouldn’t want to show my mother or don’t fit in with my seo company that I hide that way.
January 1st, 2009 at 10:52 pm
When you are competing with people who have years and years of domains/websites that have been recognized in the search engines, doing a bit of BH’ting is almost a necessity, if you are doing websites/blogs to make money.
For me, black hat is not sabotaging someone’s else’s site, but in finding ways to stay under the radar while accelerating my position in the search engines.
And in doing BH, one does not always need a website per say, to make money.
The really smart BH’ters, don’t waste their time in sabotaging other peoples websites, they keep their methods to themselves and just make money – lots of it.
February 23rd, 2009 at 8:48 am
I don’t believe there is a “book”. I also don’t believe that Google’s guidelines are what’s considered “good” or “bad”.
They’ve got an algorithm that provides relevant content to users, it’s not very objective, and it needs some help. You don’t own their search results, and they don’t own your’ site. If you wanna take some shortcuts that they don’t like, that’s their problem. If you get caught, that’s your’ problem.
At the end of the day, I like to feel like I provided value to my searchers, I haven’t done business dishonestly, and that I’ve created good in the world. This is a personal belief system, and therefore, I don’t judge what other people do, even if I hate it or feel it’s wrong.
It’s nice to hear from another “black hat” guy, that black hat doesn’t mean “unethical”.