Quality Agressive SEO
I have noticed a growing trend among webmasters who are desperately seaking top search engine positions for their website. A few years ago Blackhat SEO was seen as some kind of evil practice which would lead you directly to hell. But over the last few months it seems Blackhat SEO has become quite popular, and many webmasters are now using blackhat methods to get their website ranked!
I don’t condone or use these methods myself, but i think it is worth studying the methods used by the blackhats, or as they’re sometimes known Search Engine Spammers. Firstly lets take a look at each type of SEO and explain what each one does.
Black Hat SEO:
This is what people have come to refer to as search engine spammers. They create low quality documents and sites with content generated by software
and rank them highly for target keywords. These sites add no value to the web because they provide no fresh content, no extra information and generally very little except monetization tactics for the site owner.
Thats what black hat SEOs are after: money. The tactics used to make it happen are frowned upon by most mainstream webmasters as well as the search engines. Some of it is borderline unethical while most is not. Its a judgment call I am not here to make
White Hat SEO:
In my book, white hat search engine optimization is a contradiction in and of itself. If you are a white hat, you are doing everything according to Googles
rules. That means you are building sites purely with the user in mind and with total disregard for the search engines. Google puts it this way “build the site as if search engines didnt exist”. That
makes you a white hat. If thats what youre doing, then you are not doing any kind of optimization at all.
White hat? Only by accident: it doesnt really exist.
Gray Hat SEO:
This ranges from very light to black hat and could in fact encompass all SEOs. It really just becomes a question of the level of aggressiveness you are willing
to use in your tactics as well as the content sources you will use. An example is syndicating other peoples content on your blog with just enough of your own text to make it pass the duplicate content filters.
Ok so that’s a summary of each of the hat colours, lets look at the darkside now, and check out some of the methods they use.
As you may be aware most blackhat seo’s don’t usually create their own content/websites by hand. They use software/scripts to automatically create hundreds and thousands of pages use content generators. The best known content generators are:
RssEvolution
RSSGM
Fantomas ShadowMaker
So what about promotion? White Hat SEO’s usually ask other website owners for reciprocal links and submit their links to link directories. Well that’s not how the blackhats do it! Blackhat SEO’s refer to their way of gaining backlinks as “link dumping”. This basically means placing as many links on interactive websites as possible. When i say interactive i mean websites that run scripts such as blogs, guestbooks and forums .etc.
Comment Spam:
In it’s purest form this basically refers to leaving comments on blogs, with a link back to their website. But you can imagine how long this process would be searching for blogs and commenting on each of them, so the blackhats usually buy or more often code their own software to automate this process. The effect is hundreds and thousands of backlinks to their websites.
Forum Spam:
There are millions of forums online, and blackhats target them too. Much like comment spam, they will basically just register at forums (sometimes not needed if guest accounts are allowed) and spread their
links to their website across threads. Now as always blackhats want to make this process automated so they use a program known as Xrumer to automatically register and post threads at thousands of forums.
Guest Book Spam:
This is an old skool method of link dumping used by blackhats but it is still widely used, it basically means using software to automatically post comment on guestbooks. Although this is the old way of doing it, many still use this technique because a lot of older guestbook software doesn’t use the “No Follow” tag.
Trackback Spam:
One of the newer link dumping techniques is trackback spam. It was invented so that blogs can serve as conversation forums. When a website links to a blog post, the blog will recognize this link and create a link back to the website. This is done so that readers of the blog can access relevant content or see what others have written that relates to the blog post they just read. This is a very efficient blackhat way of getting targeted one-way backlinks. Much more so than the methods above.
So that’s a quick summary of how Blackhat SEO’s go about getting ranked. I don’t recommend using these practices as they often lead to search engines banning your website from the SERP’s.
Nuke SEO
A couple of days ago I received an email, from a mailing list that I am subscribed to I might add, that was touting the wonders of a new piece of software called SE Nuke.
(No, I am not an affiliate, but it is only fair to add a link to their website when doing a review. I saw a few other reviews that were not linking to the SE Nuke website, which I think is very unfair.)
So just what is SE Nuke?
According to the SE Nuke site, it’s “the most powerful search engine optimization software ever created”.
Obviously, I was intrigued. Could this new piece of software automate the processes I’ve been using manually for quite some time now? Could SE Nuke reduce my work day? Really triple my bottom line? Help me dominate the first three pages of Google like the sales page says?
Yes say Joe Russell and Areeb Bajwa, SE Nuke’s developers / promoters.
But when reading on, I had my doubts. You see, I’ve been working online for over 13 years. Designing, developing, and optimizing websites for solid search engine performance. Along the way learning many valuable methods of backlinking, link baiting, and link building in order to obtain long term placement in the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages).
One thing that I have learned about building solid, LONG TERM, SEO results is that there are absolutely no shortcuts. No magic bullets, no where to buy magic beans on the way to market that will lead to the golden goose. No sir, some of the wording on the SE Nuke sales page is disturbing. At least to me, because I happen to know that some of the tactics SE Nuke offers will eventually hurt your website more than it will help it.
SE Nuke sounds like a good idea, and the methods it uses really are good for SEO optimization of a website if you were to do them all manually. The SE Nuke developers have put together a really nice, FREE, ebook to download that offers very valuable advice to users wishing to manually optimize their website.
Understand, this review is not a slam on SE Nuke, or Joe Russell and Areeb Bajwa. I did in fact read the entire e-book that they are giving away, and it does give some generic, but sound SEO advice. Using social bookmarking, video sites, web 2.0 sites, and hub pages IS an excellent method for SEO and SERP domination.
But where I have to differ is when I hear really disturbing wording that over the years, time and time again, I’ve seen sites be cast into the bowels of the blacklist. The ever dreaded search engine exclusion. The blackhat SEO hell.
SE Nuke claims to automate processes that should not be automated.
Think about the spam you receive each and every day in your email. This is automated spam, generated by hackers and spammers that send out millions of unwanted solicitations daily. Clogging the internet and your inbox with garbage and junk.
Now compare this to the top websites online. If you were the owner of one of these monsters, like http://www.youtube.com or http://www.propeller.com (owned by Google and Netscape / AOL respectively), wouldn’t you be working feverishly to provide quality content to your users? Wouldn’t you spend some of that multi million dollar budget working on thwarting the efforts of duplicate content? Of course you would.
SE Nuke talks about ’spinning’ titles, creating hundreds of article variations from seed articles, and tricking the search engines.
When I read this, especially the ‘tricking the search engines’ comment, I had the urge to hide my url’s and run for the hills. If you have been online for any amount of time, you know for a fact that efforts to ‘trick the search engines’ are always, I repeat, ALWAYS countered by the same search engines you are trying to trick into giving you the listing.
Further, SE Nuke really shocked me by insinuating that you should actually use someone else’s article, and then create variations of that article (SE Nuke calls this a seed article). This is stealing my friends. It’s copyright violation at the very least, and it’s not the first time a piece of software has tried to get this by the search engines and their algorithms. No, it’s been tried before, and it always fails. It always turns out badly for the people that believe it’s a shortcut. Don’t steal the hard work of another writer, please. It’s bad karma at the very least, and certainly not good business ethics.
Tricking, spinning, and seeding, are black hat SEO tactics. Period.
Yes, you might in fact nab the first three pages in Google by using the black hat SEO tactics offered by SE Nuke. You might even have them for some time. But ultimately, you will lose these listings. Because Google is smart. AOL is smart. Yahoo is smart. These are fortune 500 companies my friends, and if you think that they are going to offer poor results for their users for any length of time, you are mistaken. They have giant staffs, people who work for them that are looking for programs like SE Nuke, in order to continue to provide excellent search results on their SERP pages.
Nope, SE Nuke is not the long term magic bullet, because the magic bullet for good SEO simply does not exist. If you are serious about making the web a viable, long term source of income, then it takes a viable, long term plan.
It takes work.
You want to take your website to the top of the search engine listings? Then you need to do the work necessary. You need good SEO. You need a plan. Then you need to follow through with that plan.
No software in the world, including SE Nuke, is going to do that work for you. No SEO automation is a good idea for long term business development. Ever.
When you read the words ‘trick’ or ’spin’ or ’seed’, run away. Run away fast.
Know what you are going into if you decide to buy and use SE Nuke. Know that you might get much more than you bargained for in the long run.
Using Old School Tactics with New Age Schemes
When it comes to the world of black hat techniques and black hat search engine optimization it seems that everybody and their mother is running to create new ways to optimize links and create the most traffic the black hat way. In all this haste to find the biggest, most efficient way to maximize your search engine results, people often forget some of the tried, tested and true methods. While Google itself starts to turn its attention on the newer more high profile black hat techniques, the company itself starts to forget about some of the older, low profile techniques. This is something you need to be ready to take advantage of if you want to have any true black hat success.
With the new anti-black hat techniques taking over, Google has been focusing a lot less on the use of doorway pages. The new algorithm used by Google has assigned more importance to the trust of a site rather than the domain of the page. For example, imagine that you have written and published an amazing article that has been working wonders as link bait. Well, if a reputable site like CNN.com writes a story and quotes your article, then under the new system used by Google, the article that appears on CNN will get a higher ranking than your site. While this may at first appear to be bad news, there are some important factors to this that need to be considered.
Now, due to this new algorithm it is obvious that creating doorway pages for new domains is essentially been rendered useless. While this may seem like a negative at first, it really isn’t. You can and should continue or start creating doorway pages and placing them on other people’s higher ranking and trusted domains. The most common example of domains that match these requirements are MSN and social networking pages. You can also use Sub-domains that are attached to hosting accounts that are relatively cheap and also sites such as Digg or ones that are similar.
It is possible to see user profiles from sites such as MySpace or Facebook show up in the top twenty of search engine fields even for keywords that are extremely competitive. You need to use the fact that these popular sites are so trusted to your advantage. A simple doorway page does not need to have any back-links and there is a vast array of places you can cram spam into with these doorway pages and essentially it is the main site that does all the advertising for you.
Now, it cannot be guaranteed how long that this algorithm made by Google will last so you need to make sure that you take advantage of this as soon and as often as you can. With very little time investing and no income whatsoever, you can place keyword maximized doorway pages on a number of popular domains and get instant recognition without any direct correspondence or linkage to your own website. You get all the benefits with very little of the risk.
