Black hat SEO tricks and how to apply them in ethical way

In the old days of the internet (few months ago) spiders and robots crawled pages to find out what is the certain page about. If they found a certain keyword (like: "black hat SEO"), they concluded this page was dealing with this certain keyword. If they found many pages with the same string of words, they believed the most relevant was the one where this string was repeated the most times.

Although these days are (almost) over, we still have to use the exact keyword we want to rank for in most important places of the page: URL, title, subtitles, text body, tags, alt tags, anchor text etc. How many of these places and how often we should repeat this specific string of words (sometimes combinations and synonyms can do the trick) depends on many factors. So we should always try what works in our specific situation and tweak the page if necessary.

All images on this page come from Pixabay, are public domain and royalty free.

Search engines love content and black hatters always provided it in huge amounts by extracting all available data in text and graphic format. Web scraping is only a fancy name for stealing.

If we want to stay ethical we shall publish only original content with all necessary credits. If we can't write everything, ask for help at experts on the subject, not at cheapest service with anonymous writers and no guarantee 'our' article sill not be published on the web at hundreds of places at once. Use original photos, licensed material with proper credit or free sites like Pixabay.

Links are the most powerful currency on the web. Although Google introduced Penguin to punish links coming from so called bad neighborhoods the equation is still pretty simple. More links you have, more votes you got in web popularity contest.

If you want to beat old page with powerful black hat background you can use several tactics:

1. ask all your friends and relatives for all possible links they  can give you

2. find another battleground

3. answer with really creative tactics

4. put on your black hat

...

But let's face it - search engines can only clean part of the problematic pages from their rankings. For everyone being caught there are dozens waiting to fight for his/her place.

Buffering is advanced black hat SEO technique which lost a bit on popularity since Penguin. The idea is simple. When black hatters realized their landing pages can get penalties due spamming and other inappropriate methods, they started to set so called buffer pages. They have directed all spammy links to the buffers and buffer transferred the authority to the landing page. If buffer was identified as page in bad neighborhood, only the buffer (Squidoo lenses were popular for this role for years) was punished and landing page could continue getting authority from other sources.

Since Penguin algorithm can (not always!) conclude that somebody (landing page) getting links from bad neighborhood (buffer page) probably belongs in bad neighborhood, both pages can get penalties.

Buffers are very useful in white hat SEO tactics too. If nothing else they remind us how fragile can be our on-line presence. We can use them to diversify our content and our links. This reduces our risk in case something goes wrong.

In the Wild World of Web this is pretty common situation...

When Google admitted links from bad neighborhood can destroy pages, several web masters, especially in very competitive niches started to pay for links coming from wrong places and showing to pages of their competitors.

Experiment of former SEO MOZ team showed every page can be bombed with proper amount of bad links and Google offered disavow tool which should be used with extreme caution. Unfortunately it can be used only by web masters, not from content writers, so it is good to know on most Web 2.0 pages we are actually very vulnerable to this threat.

How can we apply this tactics in the white hat SEO world?

1. Check our links regularly and act if we notice something suspicious.

2. Check what our competition is doing.

3. Build quality links. We need them more then ever.

This is actually very useful black hat SEO approach. We can use a lot of automated tools and stay under white hat. O.k., we should avoid stealing and spamming but we can still try to save as much time as we can. So ask for help or outsource if we can. Build a team around our projects. Focus on the part where we enjoy most (or make the majority of profits). Write a list with all necessary points of on-line writing:

1. research

2. write

3. promote

etc.

And most important: Stay focused!

The most important lesson which can be learned from this list of black hat SEO techniques is the ability to adapt to every situation. Fight only fights where you can win. Be creative. Think at least one step ahead of the algorithms. Search engines have the power, people have the wit.

All black hat SEO tricks will be eventually neutralized but for every one of them, new, even  more effective and creative method, will become available. Humans are tricksters. Always were, always will be. So beware of the black hats!