White Hat - Black Hat, Really confused?
-
I am I really new when it comes to SEO and especially link building. I have been hooked into websites ever since I did my first just writing content on what I loved. Then came the number one ranking and enquiries!
Since that time I have created many websites and have always relied on good on page optimisation and have got great results in low competition keywords.
Now I am trying to make a living out of this business with multiple websites retailing products I am hitting more moderate competition on keywords and have found myself on a 30 trial with SEOmoz.
This has been a huge eye opener for a beginner and I have not had much sleep since analysing all the data that the tools can give. (My wife thinks I have an online mistress).
What has really got me stuck is the link analysis on competitors open site explorer!
As I am becoming a real SEO research geek and creating spreadsheets on my competitors links I am finding many are paid directory links! (one off 30 dollars’) .
From what I understand from Google is that paid links are against their guidelines? These links are from sites that are ranking above me?
What I am asking is should I follow suit in a fine balanced mix or stay clear of paid links completely?
Where I always write unique content on experience for my content category pages the real chance of organic linking is slim.
Is the only way forward to buy the odd cheeky link?
-
Thanks Sha!
Will get into all of this tonight. Can’t wait! I have only been signed up to SEOmoz for a few days but feel I have learned more these past few days then I have over the past year!
Thanks for the info and no sleep for me tonight!
-
Hi Ryan
I feel a little star struck getting a reply from you! Read so many of your posts and replies, the sound advice from you others on here are why I have signed up to SEOmoz.
Really appreciate you’re advice and will stay clear of paid directories and free ones!
As you asked what the keyword we going for it is “lawn grass seed” and the site is www.lawngrassseed.co.uk
Thanks again.
-
Hi John,
Excellent response here from Ryan as always, so not much more for me to say except that there are some other excellent resources here at SEOmoz which can help you to focus on the broad range of things that might be influencing your site visibility in the Search Engines.
Essentially, as Ryan indicated, it is about taking a "future proofing" approach to your site. If you haven't already found the Pro Webinars section of the site, there is an excellent Webinar from Doctor Pete on Future Proofing Your SEO: 2012 Edition. One extra thing to note here is that all SEOmoz Pro Webinars uploaded include the presenter's Powerpoint Slide Deck.
Since SEOmoz presenters make a point of including links to useful resources etc in their decks, this is a huge extra help, so don't forget to grab it.Also, one of my favorite tools for seeing exactly what is contributing to the top 10 Rankings in a niche is the Keyword Difficulty SERP Analysis Tool where you can run Advanced Reports to see how each of the Top 10 Ranked sites for a particular keyword term are doing against a whole range of key metrics. The bonus is that even if your site isn't in the Top 10, you can enter the URL to have it included in the comparison 8D.
Rand also provided a great post that explains how to use the tool: The Best Kept Secret in the SEOmoz Toolset.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
**What I am asking is should I follow suit in a fine balanced mix or stay clear of paid links completely? **
You should stay clear of paid links completely.
There are a few legitimate directory sites which require a fee to join. Some examples are Yahoo, Business.com, BOTW. There aren't too many others. The overwhelming major of directories violate Google's guidelines. In all likelihood, the links you are seeing to your competitor's site offer no value at all. If a site has too many inorganic links, the site can incur a manual penalty in which case it will disappear from SERPs.
Link building is often a premature focus for site owners. I recommend focusing 100% on the items within your immediate control: a solid website architecture and quality content. Only after you have nailed these two steps would you look at promoting your site and its content. Far too many site owners try to promote sites which are poorly designed and whose content is simply not good enough. For these reasons, their efforts to earn links fail.
Where I always write unique content on experience for my content category pages the real chance of organic linking is slim.
This should be an indicator your content may not be good enough. What is the keyword your content is targeting? Perform a Google search and examine the top 5+ articles for the keyword involved. Take the good parts of those articles (images, videos, authoritative quotes, examples, etc) and work them in to your content. I am not suggesting you steal any content, but rather look to see what ideas are causing these articles to perform so well.
Either way, avoid anything related to paid links. I would also recommend not submitting your site to any free directories who's clear purpose is to manipulate search engine ranking. If the directory sincerely offers a legitimate value, go for it. Otherwise, avoid it.
-
I am in the same boat. Few competitors have had years refining their sites before us, yet when looking some of the top rankers are so black hat its untrue.
See here: Look at that page, linked up to death. At the bottom almost loads of links to the brands again. Check the title tags on each page. I thought mine at 70-120 characters was bad, they must be touching 200-300.
People say, yes well that site could drop off the face of earth if there caught, but come on, how do you compete with that if they are not being penalised for it?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Competitor Black Hat Link Building?
Hello big-brained Moz folks, We recently used Open Site Explorer to compile a list of inbound linking domains to one of our clients, alongside domains linking to a major competitor. This competitor, APBSpeakers.com, is dominating the search results with many #1 rankings for highly competitive phrases, even though their onsite SEO is downright weak. This competitor also has exponentially more links(602k vs. 2.4k) and way more content(indexed pages) reported than any of their competitors, which seems physically impossible to me. Linking root domains are shown as 667 compared to 170 for our client, who has been in business for 10+ years. Taking matters a step further, linking domains for this competitor include such authoritative domains as: Cnn.com TheGuardian.com PBS.org HuffingtonPost.com LATimes.com Time.com CBSNews.com NBCNews.com Princeton.edu People.com Sure, I can see getting a few high profile linking domains but the above seems HIGHLY suspicious to me. Upon further review, I searched CNN, The Guardian and PBS for all variations of this competitors name and domain name and found no immediate mentions of their name. I smell a rat and I suspect APB is using some sort behind-the-scenes programming to make these "links" happen, but I have no idea how. If this isn't the case, they must have a dedicated PR person with EXTREMELY strong connections to secure this links, but even this seems like a stretch. It's conceivable that APB is posting comments on all of the above sites, along with links, however, I was under the impression that all such posts were NoFollow and carried no link juice. Also, paid advertisements on the above sites should be NoFollow as well, right? Anyway, we're trying to get to the bottom of this issue and determine what's going on. If you have any thoughts or words of wisdom to help us compete with these seemingly Black Hat SEO tactics, I'd sure love to hear from you. Thanks for your help. I appreciate it very much. Eric
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EricFish0 -
Pharma Hack/Grey hat SEO. Cannot get site to rank, tons of incoming bad links
I have been working on a website trying to get it to show up in the SERPs again. It is being indexed which is great, it has some errors that I'm fixing now. But for the most part it should be ranking. It don't show any penalties going on, but when I did a backlink search we keep getting the cialis, viagra etc inbound links. First thought was Pharma Hack. But it's not a WP site and I recently rebuilt it. So whatever bad code could have been there it's not anymore. It doesn't show up in google either for the search site:www.mysite.com viagra cialis etc... So I'm wondering if anyone has any insight in a direction to point me? I don't understand what would be causing this to still not rank. Only thing it ranks for is it's name. Any suggestions would be very appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WeBuyCars.com0 -
Looking for recent bad SEO / black hat example such as JC Penney example from 2011
I am giving a presentation in a few weeks and looking for a "what not to do" larger brand example that made poor SEO choices to try and game Google with black hat tactics. Any examples you can point me to?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jfeitlinger0 -
Please Help- Confusion about how to Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization and Keyword Stuffing
I am pretty much a rookie when it comes to the SEO game and to be completely honest SEO is really confusing. I just recently started using MOZ and I was looking at my On-Page report and I saw that I needed to correct some “Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization” errors. So I looked at the error and the fix. Here is what MOZ gave me. Cannibalizing link "How to make a fake diploma", "How to get a fake diploma", "Making a Fake High School Diploma", "Fake Diploma Template", and "Framing your fake diploma" Explanation It's a best practice in SEO to target each keyword with a single page on your site (sometimes two if you've already achieved high rankings and are seeking a second, indented listing). To prevent engines from potentially seeing a signal that this page is not the intended ranking target and creating additional competition for your page, we suggest staying away from linking internally to another page with the target keyword(s) as the exact anchor text. Note that using modified versions is sometimes fine (for example, if this page targeted the word 'elephants', using 'baby elephants' in anchor text would be just fine). Recommendation Unless there is intent to rank multiple pages for the target keyword, it may be wise to modify the anchor text of this link so it is not an exact match. This error is for my Hompage(http://www.fake-diploma.com) for the keyword Fake Diploma. My understanding is that for Self-Cannibalization to occur I would have to have a link on this page pointing to another page using "Fake Diploma" as my anchor text since I want this page to rank for Fake Diploma. I do have the right hand sidebar which contains my most recent posts and some of my titles do include Fake Diploma. How to make a Fake Diploma
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diplomajim
Fake Diploma Template
Framing your Fake Diploma
To me theses are separate longtail keywords. While they do include Fake Diploma in them I thought theses were fine because they are not an Exact Match to each other nor are they an Exact Match to “Fake Diploma”. Am I wrong about this? Secondly I reached out on another Forum trying to get a better understanding of this and just got even more confused. I was told that I am also Keyword Stuffing and could be penalized. They said because I have Fake Diploma in most of my article titles that I am Stuffing Fake Diploma. I am in a Niche Market and of course most of my titles include Fake Diploma because that is what my entire site is about. I used the Google Keyword Tool and searched Fake Diploma and it gave me a list of about 79 related keywords like: Make a Fake Diploma Online
Create a Fake Diploma
Fake Diploma Software This is just a few of the many that I have. I thought the best way to rank for a keyword was to actually write a post about that Keyword and use it as the title of the article. I am not over using the Keyword in the actual article and I maybe have a Keyword density of about 2-5%. I thought Keyword Stuffing was where you actually used the Keyword like 50 times and also just added random Keywords to the article that did not belong. Please help me with any insights you can offer. I feel like I am doing all of this completely wrong.0 -
What are the best methods of White Hat SEO?
What are the best methods of White Hat SEO? How can you create good quality White Hat links? For example, how do you convince someone to link to your site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | harrygardiner0 -
What happens if a company only uses black hat techniques for an extended period of time?
Let's say I were to start a company. Of course, I want to be indexed, crawled, and pulled up in the search engines. So I start using black hat seo techniques. I comment spam, keyword stuff, spin articles, hide text, etc. I publish hundreds of articles per day on well know sites with excellent page rank. If I am doing all of these unethical techniques, what is going to happen to my website?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | FrontlineMobility0 -
Ever seen a black hat SEO hack this sneaky?
A friend pointed out to me that a University site had been hacked and used to gain top Google rankings. But it was cloaked so that most users wouldn't notice the hack. Only Googlebot and visitors from Google SERPs for the spam keywords would see a hacked version. See http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/122-how-hackers-gained-an-easy-1-google-ranking-using-a-university-website.whtml (my blog) for screenshot and specifics. I've dealt with hacks before, but nothing this evil and sneaky. Ever seen anything like this? This is not our client, but was just curious if others had seen a hack like this before.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
How do I find out if a competitor is using black hat methods and what can I do about it?
A competitor of mine has appeared out of nowhere with various different websites targetting slightly different keywords but all are in the same industry. They don't have as many links as me, the site structure and code is truly awful (multiple H1's on same page, tables for non-tabular data etc...) yet they outperform mine and many of my other competitors. It's a long story but I know someone who knows the people who run these sites and from what I can gather they are using black hat techniques. But that is all I know and I would like to find out more so I can report them.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kevin11