Is this a white hat SEO tactic?
-
Hi, I just noticed this website
http://www.knobsandhardware.com
hosts pages like
http://www.knobsandhardware.com/local/hardware/California-Cabinet-Hardware.html
that are filled with permutations of products + cities. These pages rank for these long tail phrases.
Is this considered white hat?
-
This works and is quick/cheap to do.
The much better options is a well written page on each area.
This way each page is 100% optimised for the keyword and contains useful, local, relevant information.
Start with the largest areas (on search volume) and add a few more pages each week/month.
If you have a list of areas as large as this then use slightly larger areas and target the big town for the page but also make references to the smaller villages within that page. Means the higher volume is well optimised and the lower volume pages are semi-optimised on a relevant page.
Interlink each of these pages to 2-3 of the others to create low OBL, relevant, varied, internal linking - rather than a single page like above with links to all of the pages.
-
This is definitely grey hat in my opinion.
If a customer types in "Jamul Cabinet Hardware" and lands on that page, how many are honestly going to convert from there? I would anticipate their bounce rates to be huge.
You are better off selecting a few key areas/cities you want to target and create customised landing pages for each. Landing pages with useful information based on that location - that will convert a lot more than this crappy spammy technique.
-
White - Only for the consumer.
Black - Only for the search engine.
Gray - Where most of us live.
That example is a dark shade of gray. I mean who in their right mind would find that second example helpful?
-
That's a funny pile of spam. Thanks for sharing!
Sounds like you're considering a version of this for your site? Even if it does rank, how well do think it converts? The only point in ranking is to convert and only a human can convert. Therefore any landing page must be first and foremost human-friendly.
I would classify this as gray hat but not the type of gray hat I would wear in public.
-
This isn't white-hat in my opinion, its grey-hat. Its a huge list that provides no benefit to anyone reading the page. On the other hand, they're only making their own site a nightmare, not anyone elses - hence the grey instead of black.
I'm surprised this ranks at all, this page should be recognized as zero quality.
-
The thing about "White Hat" is all up to how you define it. When any person looks at the page in question, it clearly looks like a spammy technique. Unfortunately, this method does work - otherwise people wouldn't do it.
I doubt this would pass any human review as being a quality page, and there are many legit ways to take the idea of the product/city page to make it provide a quality experience for the user.
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
-
Which is Important? Backlinks or Internal Links? For SEO purpose.
Which is Important? Backlinks or Internal Links? For SEO purpose.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BBT-Digital0 -
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 -
Negative SEO? Or?
We had another website attacked by negative SEO, so now I'm getting a little suspicious. The website went from around 26 linking domains to 1001 links from 311 linking domains in webmaster tools. They're all in different languages, and directories. I asked everyone at the organization and they said they didn't sign up for any services. I trust them, because I know they don't have time to breath right now, with 7 product launches this month. OSE says 79 links from 26 linking domains, so the spam links must be gone now.. but the website's been wiped pretty much clean from Google.com and is just starting to slowly (very slowing) crawl back 😞 Is there anything else that could be targeting the website with hundreds of links? Anything I can do to protect it? I've disavowed the links, but they're gone now so it probably won't help. Thanks in advance for ideas 🙂 UPDATE: The website is still not recovering in Google.com. It seems to be ok in .ca, but a recent conundrum is that it's been basically wiped clean from Bing and Yahoo rankings. I've emailed Bing and the team says it is indeed indexed, and not penalized (manually anyways). OLE says the "bad links" are no longer there, but webmaster tools still lists them all (I know, they don't update that often). My latest strategy is to start building some really strong links into the website with killer content. Their products are amazing (tv lift furniture) so it shouldn't be difficult. Just time consuming! I'm also being super-active on their social media platforms, to see if this helps boost rankings in the mean time. Any further tips to recover from negative SEO?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SmartWebPros
(Note: I do not need link removal tools. We have a process that's working just fine).0 -
Same content, different target area SEO
So ok, I have a gambling site that i want to target for Australia, Canada, USA and England separately and still have .com for world wide (or not, read further).The websites content will basically stays the same for all of them, perhaps just small changes of layout and information order (different order for top 10 gambling rooms) My question 1 would be: How should I mark the content for Google and other search engines that it would not be considered "duplicate content"? As I have mentioned the content will actually BE duplicate, but i want to target the users in different areas, so I believe search engines should have a proper way not to penalize my websites for trying to reach the users on their own country TLDs. What i thought of so far is: 1. Separate webmasterstools account for every domain -> we will need to setup the user targeting to specific country in it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEO_MediaInno
2. Use the hreflang tags to indicate, that this content is for GB users "en-GB" the same for other domains more info about it http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
3. Get the country specific IP address (physical location of the server is not hugely important, just the IP)
4. It would be great if the IP address for co.uk is from different C-class than the one for the .com Is there anything I am missing here? Question 2: Should i target .com for USA market or is there some other options? (not based in USA so i believe .us is out of question) Thank you for your answers. T0 -
SEO dead?
What does everyone think about this article? http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2 … l-content/ I tend to think its off base, Link building still works and there are tons of things that have to do with SEO that have nothing to do with link building... I think its actually quite ridiculous and written by people that actually no nothing about SEO...kind of a lame attempt by Forbes, and if anything at all, this is just forbes practicing "SEO" with a link attraction post like this. Becase SEO, is NOT dead
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imageworks-2612901 -
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 -
How to get rid of black hat links?
I have recently discovered that one of my clients has either been sabotaged or has done this himself. In the case that he didn't do anything, how do you go about getting rid of bad links? There is now over a 1000 bad links linked to his site, do I report them as spam or what is the best way to fix this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | StrategicEdgePartners0 -
Is a directory like this white hat? Useful?
This is one of my competitor's backlinks: http://bit.ly/mMPhmn Prices for inclusion on this page go from $50 for 6 months to $300 for a permanent listing. Do most of you guys do paid directories like this for your SEO Clients? My gut is telling me to run away...but I don't want to miss a good opportunity if I should be taking it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarieHaynes0