To Black Hat or Not To Black Hat

NeapolitanWorld · Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2010 8:26 pm

Should you use SEO Black hat techniques yes or no?

Raven · Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 12:27 am

Please explain Smile

NeapolitanWorld · Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 1:35 am

Hi Raven, I hope and wish the RN team a great 2010. I will do my best! so many of us here dedicate our time, talent, and much of our life to some of our sites and projects. We try to get our pages out there with a great deal of "white hat" techniques to do our best in getting good search engine results and higher PR's. However how tempting is it or where do you draw the line in methods to pursue better results. There are techniques out there that easily manipulate for example Alexa rankings, or get you one way high PR links that stretch the line of what is ethical to say the least. Cloaking is another good example. How comfortable are some of you with this technique and or are any of you using this method? It's not easy to turn away from something you are not as comfortable in doing, when so many out there are using "black hat" methods to not just get better SEO results, but apparently also manipulating affiliates programs, adsense programs and other. I hope I'm not being too general and at least I have given a better idea of the thread Very Happy

jc

jakec · Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 6:36 am

I personally would never use any Black Hat techniques.

Search Engines are always improving and if they don't pick up on it now then they will in the future and you are likely to get your site de-listed.

spasticdonkey · Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 10:56 am

there are so many legitimate ways to promote your site these days, why waste time doing something unethical that can ultimately come back to bite you in the end. I'm sure there are things you can do to improve your alexa ranking but I have managed to perform well there with no extra effort, outside of a dmoz listing and my normal seo techniques. People put too much emphasis on pagerank, and that's one of the reasons it was removed from webmaster tools in 10/2009.

Google employee Susan Moskwa wrote:

We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true

I think SEO efforts are best spent writing good content and optimizing your site for the most relevant search terms, keywords, page titles, and so on.

NeapolitanWorld · Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 11:20 am

spasticdonkey, perhaps this quote is true. But as some one whom spends some money on on-line marketing, the first two things I look at to decide if I want to do anything on a particular site is, look at PR rank and Alexa ranking Confused

jc

jakec · Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 1:49 pm

I have to also agree with what spasticdonkey is saying.

NeapolitanWorld · Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 4:24 pm

jakec, say you had 2K per month to advertise on banner ads. Say you had two websites of equal quality. However one had a PR of 6 and the other a PR of 4. Which of the two would you spend your 2K on? it's nice to agree, just for agreements sake Laughing

jc

wHiTeHaT · Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 4:46 pm

@NeapolitanWorld , the best things in the world are for free

Said by the one and only wHiTeHaT ( there is (almost) no one able to say that , couse it is simple my last name in dutch dialect). Wink

spasticdonkey · Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 5:14 pm

As far as the advertising dollar goes, paying for search engine placement is still a good ROI as compared to any other advertising media. Magazine ads cost thousands and you can put that same budget to better use promoting your website. Unlike print ads, most of the time (hopefully) the viewers of your ad are actually looking for what you are selling.

Although I see paid advertising and SEO as two completely separate entities. Participating in search engine placement campaigns such as Google adwords or Overture (now yahoo something) does not improve your unpaid results. Paying for banner ads on related sites doesn't necessarily help you SEO wise either, as the URL's are usually not readable by search engines as a link to your site. For instance:
index.php?op=ad_click&bid=17

So I see the purpose of advertising a site as this: to get "targeted" traffic, specifically customers that are looking to buy your products/services. Not to improve SEO. However, good SEO practices can lessen (or if your really lucky eliminate) the need for paid advertising.

Quote:

say you had 2K per month to advertise on banner ads. Say you had two websites of equal quality. However one had a PR of 6 and the other a PR of 4. Which of the two would you spend your 2K on?

If pagerank is the only difference between the two sites, then in theory the site with the higher pagerank should be getting more traffic and therefore more conversions into sales. But the true answer to your question is more of a business question. Which site offers a better chance of turning a larger profit? Pagerank is irrelevant since you a paying for "targeted" traffic to sell your products/services, not to improve your pagerank or unpaid results.

montego · Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2010 7:03 pm

If I am understanding Neapolitan right, he is concerned about SELLING advertising, therefore, he is trying to think like an prospective advertiser and how would they make their buying decisions. So, all things being equal, and an advertiser is looking at two sites and one is PR of 6 and the other is a 4, would the PR be an influencing factor? If the answer is "yes", that is what is driving his question about trying to boost his own Alexa and Google PR values.

I'll be honest up front. I just wanted to clear up the question being posed in order to help the discussion go in the right direction. I don't employ any SEO techniques although I personally believe that concentrating on what spasticdonkey mentioned up front (content, keyword profiling, etc.) are the way to go. I am a firm believer in "you reap what you sow". Therefore, if you "sow" black hat SEO, eventually, you will reap the ill effects of it... JMO.

jakec · Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 1:06 am

NeapolitanWorld wrote:

jakec, say you had 2K per month to advertise on banner ads. Say you had two websites of equal quality. However one had a PR of 6 and the other a PR of 4. Which of the two would you spend your 2K on? it's nice to agree, just for agreements sake Laughing

jc

If everything was equal then I would ignore the PR and spread the cost evenly, but it is very rare that you would have two sites which are completely equal. One site would be performing better in terms of traffic, sales etc and therefore I would pay more for the underperforming site.

I honestly do not pay much attention to PR.

Guardian2003 · Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 2:16 am

Personally, I would look at ROI. I would invest more money in a site that returns a higher percentage of my investment.
As for SEO, as you know, there are a million and one things that can be done to achieve better results but SEO is a journey, not an end state. Page rank is good but thats really just the starting point. Both of those sites would be ideal to enhance through link backs via social networking/blogging and of course with the release of RN 2.4 you have the opportunity to further tweak 'relevancy' with it's ability to manually over ride keywords etc which could be ideal for content pages for the holiday site.

NeapolitanWorld · Posted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 5:24 pm

montego, thanks Very Happy

I'm trying to improve my own PR and rankings and visibility with what ever methods sound "right" to me! honestly some sound very good, some are straight "white hat" methods, but others are on the edge as you say or perhaps considered "black hat" methods but not illegal by any means. It's playing within the rules, but...
The thread has gotten in to a few different subjects and this is great, in regards to the best things in life are free, so true, but in the field I'm in which is travel no question the name of the game is Google, Yahoo, key words are an excellent ROI. Not the only ones, but you start there and then go on to other avenues. When I look in to on-line media, which I totally agree spasticdonkey, the immediate ROI does not compare to print media. I have also found some available avenues almost identical in quality, so I'm left to look at other factors like PR, Alexa, Quantcast rankings, how many backlinks will I gain from one supplier or the next. So I do think PR is important, not because it might be, but because people think it is Confused

Thus far 4 out of 1 say no to black hat. I guess Marck McGuire got bit in the ass after all...

jc Laughing

NeapolitanWorld · Posted: Mon Apr 05, 2010 11:47 am

Ok so I improved my PR from a 1 to a 5 in less then 3 months with an automated comment poster. It harvest blogs, prioritizes best PR rank first. Settings allow you to go conservative or aggressive. I went in the middle! I also used a automated social bookmarker poster. I used a automated directory submitter as well.
I used an alexa tool which improved my ranking from about 5,000000 to 477,190 in about 3 weeks Smile

I would say nearly all methods were not considered white hat methods with the exception of perhaps the directory submitter...but not sure...lol. Now take it easy lay low a bit. None of the methods are illegal by any means, so why not gray hat at very minimum Laughing

jc