What if White Hat SEO does not get results?
-
If company A is paying 5k a month and some of that budget is buying links or content that might be in the gray area but is ranking higher than company B that's following the "rules" and paying the same but not showing up at all, what's company B suppose to do?
-
It's not too late for you to start your next career, Robert.
You know how new ventures can be fun.
Or, you can simply do stand-up at the local pub for tips.
-
Damn,
I shoulda been a comedian (is that the right spellin')
-
lol
Loved the "hanky". I'll laugh about it all the way to the office.
Thank you, Robert. nominated for humor of the month award
-
If you are thinking about what type of links you can buy with 5k a month, then you are dying and don't know it yet
If you are thinking of being competitive in terms of white/black hat, I am afraid you are really looking at it the wrong way. You need to figure out what is going to make you a better brand than your competitor and win in areas that spammers wont fight in, like brand, customer service and UX
S
-
I wish I had seen this earlier, quite the interesting question... So company A is "buying links or content that might be in the gray area and outranks CoB for some keywords. Company B is the good guy.
First, and I think foremost, if I am associated with company "B" (someone hand me a hankie at the nobility of being a true martyr), I am going to take two steps back and ask this question: "How do we know that company A is doing anything gray and how do we know what they are doing is the reason for their ranking better than we are?"Why, because believing you are the more noble, smarter, best dressed, etc. is a common refrain of those who are not looking close enough at themselves. So, no, I am not advocating black hat SEO with the hanky comment (because IMO, it is not the brightest SEO - yes those doing it are free to throw the darts now cause frankly I don't care). I made the hanky comment to get your attention as I would my staff when we start to say how good we are. Forget it as it is irrelevant when it comes to the battle.
Our clients are not paying us to be Pollyanna. Yes, there are those who do anything for a ranking and that does not matter. What do I want? I want to out think them. I want to out create them. I want to out motivate my team. I want to argue for quality content, good UI/UX, metrics that make sense over metrics that appear to make sense. I want to stomp my client's competition into an unmitigated hole and own them. Yes, I will do it fair and square as I don't have time to deal with dumb penalties. But, I am not going to throw out a rotator cuff patting myself on the back over the color of a friggin hat. I am going to win because I am smarter, my team is the best, and if all else fails, I will simply outwork them and write the content myself because I know I am that good.
Sorry, if that turned into a rant, but the trap of whose hat was the whitest today is a big one for a pro seo.
Best to all, God I love this forum,
Robert
-
I watched a competitor get absolutely annihilated by Penguin. I've found that black hat SEO will always have a bad ending. It may take them a few months, but aggressive Black Hat always gets found. And I have never heard of White Hat SEO not working. I can only say perhaps you need some help understanding what some White Hat tactics are, especially regarding technical SEO. (Are you talking Technical SEO, External SEO or Front End SEO?) Each has different tactics for success.
-
but not showing up at all
If this is true, and the current SEO has been on the job for a few months, then it is time to evaluate their performance. I am not saying that they are screwing up, just saying that at least a trickle of traffic could be starting to flow.
White hat is slow to produce - especially from a standing start.
-
I have seen this scenario. In fact, on some level, it's playing out for me very personally. That being said, I haven't ever had white hat SEO produce zero results. It has always produced some positive results. Sometimes the results are awesome. Sometimes they are "ok." I have been (and currently am) in a situation where, at least for right now, it appears that a competitor using black hat SEO (I know because I used to work for them), is out-ranking us (we are using strictly white hat) for several key terms.
Frustrating? Yes, of course...and hard to explain to a CEO.
What I will say is this, focus on how the business is doing instead of obsessing over keyword rankings. Why? Because of this: Just because your competitor is outranking you using black hat techniques does not mean their business as a whole is succeeding.
You see, what I also know about this competitor is that they are maybe one bad sales month away from going belly up. All those black hat techniques aren't going to do diddly if they go under....and us? We'll still be here. We'll still be here because we focus on sound, solid business strategies.
The other thing you need to consider is how you are defining "results." For us, results are a combination of higher traffic, better conversation rates, higher AOV, and ultimately higher profit. Do you know that your compay "A" that's using black hat is actually beating you out on the bottom line of revenue? Unless you know for sure, don't assume that they are.
If I were company B, I'd put my blinders on, continue with white hat and make darn sure my business model and marketing plans were rock solid. These are the things that make it possible for businesses to survive long-term. Company A is going to have a lot of cleaning up and 'splaynin to do when they get de-indexed out of Google. If they've hung their hat on that, they won't be around long and Company B will still be standing.
That's my two cents!
Dana
-
I would focus on producing high quality content and getting it syndicated on high authority relevant websites. This strategy is safer in the long run and it is also very difficult to duplicate without putting in all the time and effort.
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
-
What would be the best course of action to nullify negative effects of our website's content being duplicated (Negative SEO)
Hello, everyone About 3 months ago I joined a company that deals in manufacturing of transportation and packaging items. Once I started digging into the website, I noticed that a lot of their content was "plagiarized". I use quotes as it really was not, but they seemed to have been hit with a negative SEO campaign last year where their content was taken and being posted across at least 15 different websites. Literally every page on their website had the same problem - and some content was even company specific (going as far as using the company's very unique name). In all my years of working in SEO and marketing I have never seen something at the scale of this. Sure, there are always spammy links here and there, but this seems very deliberate. In fact, some of the duplicate content was posted on legitimate websites that may have been hacked/compromised (some examples include charity websites. I am wondering if there is anything that I can do besides contacting the webmasters of these websites and nicely asking for a removal of the content? Or does this duplicate content not hold as much weight anymore as it used to. Especially since our content was posted years before the duplicate content started popping up. Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Hasanovic0 -
More or Less pages helps in SEO?
Hi all, I have gone through some articles where less pages are suggested and they claim that they will be favoured by Google. I'm not sure as with limited pages, we can only target limited keywords. There might be threat from Google in-terms of doorway pages for more pages. But one of our competitor has many pages like dedicated page for every keyword. And their website ranks high and good for all keywords. I can see three pages created with differnet phrases for same on keyword. If less pages are good, how come this works for our competitor? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How did I get over 1000 backlinks in less then a month? help?
Hi Guys I'm a newbie and just started my website, im wondering if im reading this correctly, i use a tool called my seo tools and its telling me my website zenory.co.nz has over 1600 backlinks, this is scary since the site is only 5months old and i didn't see this till at least today and i check my sites backlinks on a regular basis. However when I check with moz it says I only have 2? I'm a little confused. Any advice here? Much appreciated Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Changes to SEO with disavow?
Has the game changed a lot with the disavow tool I can see people still saying check out what our competitors are doing but with just going through a disavow myself how do you actually know what the correct link diversity is as 0 - 100% of the links could be disavowed. Also could a competitor not just buy a load of spammy links and disavow them to mask there real links. (I know in my backlinks on 150 are good and the rest is disavowed crap)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Is my competitor up to no good? Strange site-explorer results.
I'm researching a competitor using site explorer and the seomoz toolbar and getting some strange results. When you search by the domain name in site explorer you get no results, but the toolbar shows 170K incoming links. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.augustagreenlawns.com I noticed the top referring page was a strange internal url so I ran that through site explorer and discovered 19 links.. When you put the strange link in a browser, it redirects to the home url;.. At this url the toolbar shows 220 links and semoz shows 19 http://www.augustagreenlawns.com/?xid_78e7f=0f2a64344c8de6bdf2d8cdf8de93ea5c http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.augustagreenlawns.com%2F%3Fxid_78e7f%3D0f2a64344c8de6bdf2d8cdf8de93ea5c What is up with that url? What are they doing? This is a site ranking #1 for my local search term even though he has about 50 pages of almost duplicate content. See link below. I'm really scratching my head here. http://www.augustagreenlawns.com/home.php?all=categories
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dwallner0 -
Negative SEO - Case Studies Prove Results. De-rank your competitors
Reading these two articles made me feel sick. People are actually offering a service to de-rank a website. I could have swore I heard Matt Cutts say this was not possible, well the results are in. This really opens up a whole new can of worms for google. http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/ http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-study/ This is only going to get worse as news like this will spread like wildfire. In one sense, its good these people have done this to prove it to google its just a pity they did it on real business's that rely on traffic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dean19860 -
White Papers! Is this still good for SEO
Does publishing a white paper good for SEO? We are trying to decide to publish one or not for the purpose of SEO. If it will not help, we will spend money for other things.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AppleCapitalGroup0 -
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