Is it blackhat to go to loads of free hosts, lenses, blogs etc and create a bit of content, get it indexed and the simply link to your real site? I read an ebook on it but it just seems like a new age link farm?
No, it's not a blackhat you can do it, no problem. Try to publish somehow unique content on all these hosts, lenses, etc.
Not at all blackhat, it is actually quite white hat to use these resources to build links. Without promoting the content you create on each of these sites though, the link power they give to your main site will be limited.
xD - ok don't listen to the above guys. It's blackhat, any kind of link creation that is fake, i.e, put there by you for the sole purpose of ranking higher is blackhat. In this regard there is very little that is whitehat other than making your site more crawlable and creating good content that attracts links naturally. Beyond that is blackhat because the links created are not natural. The question shouldn't be, "is this blackhat", it should be "can I get away with this and what is the risk versus reward".
Yeah of course it's Blackhat. But don't forget to keep it naturally !!! Otherwise Google will ban your whole Blog-Farm.
Whether it is "White Hat" or "Black Hat" in not important, it will just get you low quality links that Google will discount anyway. It would be smarter to do "reciprocal linking" with proper SEOed anchor text. The quality of the links are still very low with no PR but you will get credit for anchor text branding.
So all link building is blackhat? Don't make me laugh! Google themselves say that there is nothing wrong with building a website's SEO, as long as you don't do anything morally unethical. if the content you supply on the free webhost is legit, then it's whitehat. If you just make the pages link farms, it's blackhat.
I would just do it with maybe 3 different blogs or free hosts. don't go nuts with it and you will be fine. Just create sites simular to your niche with good content and then link a few to your main site using different but similar anchor text. The links will not be worth much though. Probably as much as a PR0 directory link. Yes it's kinda blackhat, more like Grayhat lol. If you don't go overboard you should be fine. I would not waste my time with it though.
Yes, technically all link building that is done with the sole intention of manipulating the search listings in your favour is blackhat. It is fact that Google would rather no one give themselves a competitive advantage by building fake links. The whole idea of the PageRank algorithm was the concept that good content would get linked to and bad content would not, thus by counting links you can get a good picture of whats the best content to put at the top of the listings. Link building scews this picture and means that content that isn't necessarily the best can get the top ranking. Now don't get me wrong, I couldn't care less whether good content gets to the top or not, for me, all thats important is getting a client a good rank and getting my pay. Just irritates me to see people branding what they're doing as whitehat as if Google or any other link counting search engine approves what they're doing. If you're link building to get a better rank you are doing exactly the opposite of what search engines want you to do, you ARE blackhat. Why do you think the new Google search engine guide includes nothing about link building, because they don't really want people to do it. Either accept that you are blackhat (of course don't put it like that to the client) or concentrate exclusively on techniques that do not attempt to manipulate rankings but only make your website is easier to crawl and index.
Some of you are saying it is black hat. How so? What did I miss in the original question? A link farm is nothing BUT LINKS. Your question sound like what link builders are supposed to be doing.
In your description and in my point of view, its not blackhat. LINK FARM is wherein a site has page of links going to another site then that site has a link going back to the previous site's page.
It is olny black hat if you are doing it for page rank. I build links to spread the word about my site - which is totally ethical and is not black hat at all. What about all are forums sigs are those black hat? NO they are use promoting our websites to like minded people. You should olny build links where you will actually get some traffic tho or else it is a waste of your time. Kill 2 birds with one link and put links on pages with traffic that way you get the link and the click troughs. The olny way i would start other blogs to promote my main blog is if i was promoting my other blogs as well. Link farms can not hurt your site if you don't link back to them or i would be creating link farms and bombing my competition. You cant really get into any trouble for anything that inst on your site. Building links is White hat and not black hat.
If the content you're adding the these sister sites is unique and informative it's not balckhat at all. If it's just words and links or plagiarized content then I would consider it balckhat. Either way I think you're better off if you host the sister sites on different servers.