Is There a Future to Black Hat SEO

In the Dec/Jan issue of the iGB Affiliate Magazine we featured a really interesting article by Dave Naylor regarding black hat SEO and what the future is for this "dark art" - A reprorduction of the article can be found below:

I’ve lost track of the times I’ve been asked about the black hat/white hat issue down the years, particularly whether one has more of a future than the other. The answer has changed a lot over the years. The ‘grey area’ in-between has probably never been bigger or more contentious. So how did we arrive at this point? My own experience might shed a little light on that – as well as where I think the industry is heading.

Many moons ago, I was a pure black hat affiliate in competitive sectors like pharmaceutical and finance – and affiliates simply couldn’t compete in that space without a command of the dark arts. Actually, although I was unstoppable when it came to SEO, I was never particularly good at monetising. Other SEOs would laugh at me because I was number one for ‘credit cards’ with no revenue coming from it. What really drove me on was getting that top spot, and it still is, except the way I go about it had changed.

2001 – 2003 was a heady time for guest book and blog spam. We built programs that would go out and build a million links overnight. Back then, this industrial scale spamming was pretty easy. There was no such thing as Akismet or nofollow and noone really understood how or why people would use their properties for someone
else’s benefit.

That put us in an arms race with Google. Blog spam was too easy to detect, so we moved onto sub domain spam. That worked for a time too. And then we moved to directory generation – using expired domains and republished content… and then on to the next technique…

SEO, whether it is black, white or grey shares a commonality. Techniques have a limited shelf life before they get replicated. When too many people are successful, that makes it easy for Google to detect. Today, platforms like WordPress are constantly evolving to reduce spam and to protect their users before Google even gets there.
Google has always valued one thing above all else: links. As loopholes close, black hat SEO has had to head further away from the middle ground to include hacking for links, WordPress exploits, exploiting authority from .edu domains, producing fake sites, etc. These days, I don’t go near that stuff.

At some point, what seemed to be relatively harmless ways to build links and take opportunities have, to me personally, become more questionable. As a company, we moved away from building our own revenue model web properties around five years ago and headed into consultation and direct SEO for clients. We now offer good solid white hat SEO advice, maybe with a tinge of grey. That doesn’t mean being unaware of black hat techniques. Without that knowledge, no-one can understand how to rank in the most competitive industries, and we have now moved from being an affiliate to working with super affiliates and merchants on their overall SEO strategy.

How Have we Arrived at White Hat as the Way Forward?
Because of the kind of brands we work with and the changing infrastructure of the web, we play on the safe side of the fence. If the client is aiming to build a long-term brand online then it is very important to protect the domain. In many black hat techniques you adopt a ‘build and burn’ approach to web properties. For a brand, that’s commercial madness.

Unlike affiliates and black hats, many companies can’t take the risk of getting banned or penalised. Over the last year, we have helped an increasing number of companies who have received poor SEO. These are sites have been banned or severely penalised and their priority is to clean up their site to get re-included. These are the companies that have found out the hard way that ‘the quick win’ to get high rankings can be a fool’s game. They enjoyed their time at the top, but it’s a long way to fall. We always stress to new clients that SEO has to be done steadily. Building a stable set of defensible rankings is not a quick process.

How Important is the Website?
The main area that we focus on in the early months of a campaign is making sure the site has good, unique and well-structured content. To a black hat, that might not even be on the radar. They’re playing for numbers, whereas we’re in the business of building brands and long term results.

Often, we actually recommend a new website to clients before they even reach the SEO stage. Poor structure and design can kill a site’s chances. Additional effort and finances put into building a new site properly is well worth it. We do this in-house as much as possible as fire fights between SEO agencies and developers can
kill a project before it’s even begun.

Is Content King?
Content writers love that phrase but it doesn’t really hold up. A strategy solely based on content is a very long term proposition. However, content is a very important part of the SEO process as it helps reinforce the importance of a site and in building an infrastructure.

One piece of advice that I would give when it comes to content is to keep content writers in house. You’re the people with domain knowledge and insight and you should leverage that. If you are going to outsource and buy in content then remember that ‘you get what you pay for’.

We have tried the ‘1 cent a word’ content and it’s not worth the effort of having to check it or even rewrite it. Paying decent money for content in the first place is easily and economical. It’s also good to produce a variety of content – whether blog posts, news articles, pages on site, press releases and social media content. It all helps in the attempt to get more authority for keywords, and ultimately attract links and visitors.

Is Buying Links Black Hat?
Now here is the place where the arguments really start.

According to Google, buying links is a black hat SEO technique and it specifically goes against its terms. Google’s analysis states that buying links is all about trying to influence its algorithms. I argue that this is where it gets quite grey – with a lot of leeway in the intention behind a link.

Links are something that all search engines value as a good scoring factor to determine relevancy. But one rule that we have always stuck to is that if a link is easy to get then it’s probably not worth having. Link building is one of the hardest parts to SEO and to get it right while protecting the domain is a skill in itself. Buying links outright from a link broker will not tend to add any value to the site visitor.

We look for opportunities where the relationship is complimentary and (hopefully) useful to the readers of both sites. If someone follows a link from site A, we want site B to be of value to them. Whether it’s advertising or advertorial, links can be ‘bought’ – but not in a manipulative way.

Thankfully, the emphasis is shifting to quality rather than quantity. The amount of money some companies spend chasing mere link volume baffles me. There are plenty of companies who spend big, but it needn’t be that aggressive. Spending more time acquiring a few great quality backlinks to a site is better than building hundreds
of low grade fodder links. It’s all to do with making sure that you have a natural looking link profile for that industry sector. There are ways to acquire good links without going down the black hat route.

Conclusion…
Whether you go ‘black hat’ or ‘white hat’ you’re in the same game. You need content, links and infrastructure to support your campaign. If you’re a brand with lots of money invested in what you’re doing, you don’t want to play at the blacker end of the field. You’ll get burned and there might not be a way back.

For affiliates and the like, black hat is still an option. You can afford to experiment and take chances because the next opportunity is around the corner. If a property or two goes down you can take the hit and move onto the next thing.

About the author:
David Naylor (DaveN) has been an industry leader in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Online Search Marketing for 13 years, leading large online marketing campaigns for many companies with excellent and sustained results. As the owner of Bronco, www.bronco.co.uk, he works with major online brands, merchants, operators and super affiliates. www.davidnaylor.co.uk Twitter @davenaylor / @bronco

Article originally published in iGB Affiliate: Issue 18