I decided it’s time to give my view on what exactly black hat is.
Many people out there are still unaware of what exactly Black Hat SEO is. Even some black hats call themselves search engine spammers thinking these two notions are completely interchangeable. To me, Black Hat is a much wider concept than simply search engine spamming. Blackhat can be viewed as a unity of techniques, tactics, philosophy and tools.
First the philosophy. Despite of what some may think, BH is not a crime. We don’t violate any laws. We don’t even do anything really “unethical”, as some search engines claim. The standards of what’s ethical and what’s not in this case are set up not legally but by the search engines themselves (mainly Google) – and they do not own the Internet, nor are they any state authority with legislative functions. Read this article about the “unethical SEO” myth to get a deeper view on this issue.
The techniques used by blackhats mainly consist of finding vulnerabilities in the SEs’ algorithms and using them to our benefit. Should it be called unethical just because the search engines didn’t have enough insight/resourses/brain to fix them? – I doubt it…
The key to the BH tactics is in targetting niche keywords and producing large numbers of sites/pages and winning by numbers. Read Earl Grey’s interview for a detailed explanation of this.
Of course, creating large numbers of sites with huge amounts of pages is not possible wihtout special tools. These tools help us automate the process and no black hat could ever imagine his life without them. Here is an overview of some of these tools, though of course there are many more of them out there.
Finally, the question: is black hat suitable for everyone? – probably not. If you only have a few white hat sites that you can’t afford getting banned don’t start messing with the dark side. If you can’t afford building a smart black hat empire of sites on different domains and preferrably different hosting accounts don’t mess with it. Otherwise, everybody with brains can benefit from employing blackhat techniques in some way.
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