Blackhat myths and facts

Let me give you guys a little background on myself. Back in 97 I started designing web sites. I built a couple automotive sites and busted my ass promoting them. They got to the point where they were bringing in about 900.00 a month. Enough to pay the rent, but that's about it. In 2002 I started putting up doorway pages, got into adsense arbitrage, and built MFA sites. On an average day I was making 1,000.00 a day. It's been 5 years and nothing much has changed with the search engines. I made over 250K last year with ypn. Say what you want about black hat, but it bought me the house I live in, it bought me my corvette, it allowed me to quit my day job (almost 3 years ago), and it is funding my software company. Not bad for such a "short term" strategy.

 

Many people don't know about blackhat really, those who don't know please don't comment about it.. Blackhat rulez..

 

Google won't ban a site for over-optimizing if they are doing everything else right. There is no reason as alot of good sites do it thinking it will help. There are a lot of factors that won't get you banned but won't help you either. You need help...
Ps. Cough drops might do the trick

Seeing as it takes at least a month to get out of sandbox in Google(generally) you can take at least that month off. Also you are ranking for small terms no big competitive phrases. And google will catch you...

It depends what your aims are. You shoot for your corvette my aim is for the moon....

 

He's talking about truths, you're talking about hopes

 

I'm not talking about what i'm "shooting for". I'm talking about what has already happened.

Sandbox? Sorry, my sites never see it.

Google wont ban a site for over-optimizing? You're kidding right? If not I question your white hat seo abilities.

 

Again you speak without knowing... If eight hadn't said what he made you wouldn't have any idea and likewise you have no idea what I make. I like the story of the employee who wanted his first wage to be 1 penny an hour. His next was to be 2, 4,8 and so on. He soon was making thousands an hour. The point is if your willing to start out small, work hard and be patient you will soon be light-years ahead of any BH. Now if you disagree feel free to go the BH approach. I am not going to try and stop you.

 

No Google will not ban you for over-optimizing. Penalization can occur if you over-do it but Google ignores alot of petty stuff such as the keywords tag, keyword density etc etc. If the site is overall good google will not ban it for over-optimization alone. If this was true your sites wouldn't last a minute.

 

I think people see black hat as unethical because it uses google algorithms that were designed to make each link a vote - in a way that doesn't include humans. In other words, for people who feel that the votes should be votes by people, black hat subverts the system. It's our democratic upbringing coming out.
But - as in most ethical debates -there is a grey area here. Automatic links are obviously not 'votes' in the conventional sense of the word. But neither is posting comments on myspace. Or just being darn annoying in shoving your links under people's noses. Is that 'fair' to people not doing that kind of promotion? I prefer to stay on the white side of the fence, but to make the google-algorithms about ethics is really a bit over the top.

 

If we want to go there, then having links in your signature on a message forum would count as "non" votes as well

 

On some that is correct. Forums such as DP to pass some value but this value is effected by how many other links are on the page and whether or not they are related. Google can tell whether a link is quality or not and non-quality links have very very low values.

 

As a new webmaster trying to get his feet wet, this whole post was very informative with lots of information from "Senior" DP members. I can honestly say that I still don't know which method (BH or WH) is better. At first I was very tempted to try BH, my reason behind this was reading threads in which people were making xxxx.xx$ off adsense a day, while I check my adsense and see my $1.48 for the week. It can be quite frustrating!
To you senior DP members thanks for the time spent in posting in this thread.

But as for now I think I'll just try and learn more about SEO before I make a decision on which method I want to implement.

 

You don't have to chose one or the other either. I make use of both extensively. This keeps me out of the "sandbox" in google so I can start earning money from almost day one while still working on my long term seo in the interim. I've never lost a white hat domain doing this over the course of the last 4 or 5 years.

 

There are plenty of WH webmasters who make over $1000/day: http://www.1stsearchenginerankings.com/2006/10/09/how-to-make-money-with-google-adsense/

Some of these make even more now. And the awesome thing is there money only increases. They never have to worry about Google taking their money one month.

 

I guess I don't know enough about SEO to use both. Heck, I cant even use one haha! My first site has been up for about 3 months, the domain is www.politicalrundown.com The only search results I get are my main page and some broken URLs. So essentially the only way someone is going to find my site via Google is if they type in "Political Rundown" or my exact domain name.

You said you had quit your dayjob over 3 years ago? I envy you as I am at my day job right now! =)

 

Thank you for the words of encouragement I will happily look into the link you provided.

 

You got to be careful. People like 1eight have something to sell you so will promote BH as best they can. What they won't tell you is the thousands who get banned in Google because these use these methods. BH is very risky and takes alot of experience. Without it you will likely get banned before you make anything.

 

wrong

Correct. I always talk out of my ass and usually its still better then most of the sh*t produced by others (you?)

Huh? So its unethical not to obey the Webmaster guidelines? I guess everyone who buys a link or does link exchange is a BH then? I am not sure I can follow this argument. Is Google the upholder of Ethics on the internet?
Maybe I should have been more clear when I said a BH understands technology. Maybe I should have said a successful BH. Would that have been more correct dear sir?

Hm. C is quite common. Even Webmasterworld does it to get their stuff indexed by SE and yet they are quoted many times in Google's own Matt Cutts blog. Makes me wonder why he would quote BH.
Oh wait, I think you just talked out of YOUR ass!
IP delivery or Bot detection (commonly referred as cloaking) is NOT BH. It is simply a means of better guiding the bots. A flash website may not be readable at all to bots unless you do this. What about blocking a spammer in your .htaccess? Aren't you detecting his/her IP to block them from accessing your site? Isn't this cloaking? Where do YOU draw the line? Maybe others draw it elsewhere?

Ah. This last statement is something I agree with. Your entire post could have been reduced to these two words and still have the same information after a thourough redundancy reduction.

So why did I say that BH people understand algorithms? Check any BH forum and have a peek in the programming section. You'd be amazed what you can find there goes way beyond the things you can find in any other forum.

I am not a BH but I enjoy reading the forums since I can learn a lot from these people. At least my mind is open to other ideas.

A.

 

Great post. I agree with many things said, but I noticed that they talk about shoving the biggest rectangle down users throats.
To be honest, I am less inclined to visit such a site again.
Honestly, on my WH sites I am doing the opposite. I put the ads where they aren't as intrusive in the hopes to have the best user experience possible.

My Philosophy: If a user doesn't like what he/she sees, they will find the ads by looking around. I don't want users to click the ads (and leave my site) thinking its just another part of my site (ads blended too well). Those are users I could have kept on my site.

To me, a user who looks at 10 pages and bookmarks my site is worth more than 5 users who see one page and leave through adsense.

It always surprises me to find that 99% of webmasters don't share this idea.

 

That is an interesting point Andre, that is indeed something I have overlooked. It does make more sense though, to have someone visit your site often as opposed to mistakingly clicking on one of your ads and leaving your site. I wonder if the user would just instantly say "Dang it, another ad" and immediately hit the back button to go back to your site, or if they would just stay on the new site.
For me, my sites traffic will increase during political elections so it makes sense for people to have my site bookmarked for those times.

Thanks for the tip.

 

I totally agree with that. I want the visitors to stay and generally my clicks come within 1 minute of arriving which means for some reason or other they were done there and still wanted info. My CTR is lower than before but my visitors are much happier.