There is a difference. But I'm talking about Black Hat SEO used by hackers: doorway pages, hidden links, cloaking. Sometimes they are the same people.
Actually since Google did ASK for robots.txt on your site and there were no disallow rule for googlebot there
Yes, but that's a completely different field altogether. Being Black Hat doesn't mean you have to be a hacker. I've used Black Hat a lot in the past, but I would never consider hacking as a legitimate strategy. To con the search engines is one thing, to start breaching the security of other people online is way and beyond what I set out to do. Linking the two is deceptive in the sense that it casts Black Hat in that familiarly shady light. The nofollow/disallow thing is complete BS too. Why should I have to opt out of somebody else's business strategy?
I'm not here to judge anyone. I just want to say that many sites are already involved in black-hat things, even though their owners are completely unaware of what's happening behind the scenes. And by the way, the thread started wanted to know about black hat seo tricks. And this way it is easy to learn by example: find the hacked sites, check how they hide links, check where the links point to, check the doorways, etc. Just for educational purpose Or someone wants to show his own black-seo'd sites?
I can't imagine too many people are going to want to compromise their black hat sites, but I will say this. It's true that the most profit to be made is from clean White Hat sites. What people don't realize is that by harnessing the sheer linking power of Black Hat, you gain an absolutely huge advantage for your White Hat projects. Let's say I use some Black Hat scraping techniques and a couple of cheap databases. It's not going to take me long before I have over a million pages indexed in Google. These pages are useless on their own and I don't expect them to make much in the way of profit. I simply want them to pick up a few Adsense clicks here and there so that they can pay their expenses. But what I do have now is a million pages, indexed by Google, to send a massive boost to my Grey Hat sites. These are the sites that I hope to pick up some extra affiliate sales although once again - I only care that they're making enough to pay for themselves. The final stage involves linking my Grey Hat sites to my money generating White Hat sites. It's something that was written about over on BlueHatSEO in an excellent article. The final outcome is a White Hat site with untraceable foundations and the ability to draw on the volume of a few thousand backlinks... So while White Hat SEO is still massively important in my shop window, it's the Black Hat foundation building - the factory line work - which allows me to get a competitive advantage over some poor gospel singing Whiter than White Hat webmaster.
So to recap, you use Black Hat site to send massive boost to your Grey Hat site which in turn linking it to your White Hat site. Wouldn't that make your White Hat site black then? So your definition of White Hat site is just really a Black Hat site done properly. Is that correct? and don't take this the wrong way either, I just want some clarification
In principle, yes. But this doesn't compromise the integrity of the White Hat site. I like to use a combination of database scripts and content scraping software to output thousands and thousands of pages that you could consider Black Hat. I leave a little tool in my database which allows me to add links across the Black Hat sites as I so please. In order to have any success with this method, you have to understand that getting the Black Hat sites indexed is the number one priority. Let's take a database driven song lyric website for example. I can buy a database here at DP for maybe $10. Then all I have to do is setup my PHP script to output each database entry to a fresh page. Suddenly I have a site of 200,000 pages which I upload and begin to ping Google with. Some Black Hat RSS feed scraping will keep our site fresh and keep the bots interested. If 1/5th of the pages get indexed, that's great. Still only 1 in 5, but you've got 40,000 pages in Google. So grab some more databases, grab another template and keep going until you have a few hundred thousand pages in Google. Now you can begin to link these database driven sites to your Grey Hat sites. I like to use Squidoo or hosted Wordpress for my Grey Hat sites. I'll start to sell a few affiliate prroducts and immediately jump on the back of the traffic boost that comes with having 200,000 backlinks sitting in your pocket. These Grey Hat sites will perform well in their own right, and they'll have more authority than the Black Hat sites. So you then get on with building your White Hat site and it is exactly what it says. When I say that I study all forms of SEO - Black Hat, Grey Hat and White Hat - this is why. I'll put every ounce of my knowledge in to building a 100% clean White Hat site. Grab some natural links and do everything that Matt Cutts croons about until the cows come home. You'll be competitive, but you're probably still gonna be sitting there wishing you could go that extra mile and compete for the most relevant keywords in the top 5 results. Of course, the crux is that on TOP of all that natural White Hat work...I can link my Grey Hat sites to my White Hat sites (which are hosted on a different server to the Black Hat stuff). And I can even link my relevant Black Hat sites directly to my White Hat money site if I'm smart about it. It's a one way chain of power. Millions of Black Hat pages > Quite a few Grey Hat hosted pages > One White Hat site. They power each other with the White Hat site (where serious money is made) reaping the benefits of your untraceable groundwork. If a Black Hat site gets penalized, the White Hat site loses nothing because it hasn't linked back to it. And even if it has, it'll already be stored away safely on another server and I'll have more than enough genuine White Hat SEO links built to cover my tracks. Have you ever seen these niche websites ranking well at the top of Google with seemingly no outstanding content but backlinks from everywhere? Do you really think somebody has gone round and built all that manually? Most of the time, you've been undone by a White Hat site with Black Hat foundations that are completely untraceable.
I think all this techniques work only upto PR3. To become higher that PR3 depend upon your website content.
I've seen white hat, black hat, grey hat, blue hat, green hat...... anyone know where these terms first originated? Is there an *Official* list of Black Hat tricks that you should avoid? Or is this a matter of interpretation from let's say....Google that decides next week that what you've been doing is now wrong? It's really exhausting to keep up and sometimes you just want to throw your hands up and say, "I'll let this site sit for 10 years and then go check on it. " Maybe Microsoft or Yahoo will take you if Google doesn't. Funny, lately my Analytics show more hits from Yahoo than Google. Used to be the other way around. Whatever.
I'd say it's not about the trick itself, it's about how you execute it. The first step is trial and error. You have to work out what's going to slip past Google, and what's going to get flagged. The second step is covering your tracks. There are many other webmasters out there who will make it their business to report your site if they see it benefitting from Black Hat SEO. There are ways to combat this but that's for a different post altogether.
Question for all: If an HTML Command is legal, why should the SEs make it "black hat"? Example: <noscript> <a href="c-45-security-cameras.aspx">Security Cameras</a> <a href="c-49-infrared-security-cameras.aspx">Infrared Security Cameras</a> <a href="c-50-dome-security-cameras.aspx">Dome Security Cameras</a> <a href="c-52-weatherproof-security-cameras.aspx">Weatherproof Security Cameras</a> <a href="c-51-vandal-resistant-cameras.aspx">Vandal Resistant Cameras</a> <a href="c-46-ip-security-cameras.aspx">IP Security Cameras</a> <a href="c-47-box-security-cameras.aspx">Box Security Cameras</a> <a href="c-55-spy-security-cameras.aspx">Spy Security Cameras</a> </noscript> If you place a set of URLs within it, they are "hidden links" to Google? Will this get your site penalized for using it?
Thats the problem right there, some people read some technique on some blog somewhere and decide it to give it a go, guess what, no black hat technique can just be followed step by step without deeper understanding and such. Believe you me, I don't do black hat not because I disagree, its more because I don't want to fuck things up. little knowledge is dangerous.....
Hello kartik, If you is interested in learning blackhat, register at http://syndk8.net/forum/, Before you ask any questions about BH, I suggest to first search the forum, because chances are it has been asked already and answered.
wow, amazing discussion going on here.. thanks for sharing your knowledge @ tehfincheh's ... thanks for the useful links guys.
One day I tried black hat but I don't advise you to practise this! But I know that Google isn't aware of all black hat tricks!
tehfincheh's, Just curious if you are the man behind www.bluehatseo.com?? You write like him and say the same exact things. Anyway, if you guys havent checked out that site I would suggest it PS: its PR 5 with no follow comments.