We all know “Black-hat” is bad, and if you use these strategies you will get caught…eventually. Hurting your reputation, dropping your search engine rankings, and credibility, even possibly getting you black-flagged from search engines completely. As this digital industry evolves, there are many people that are always looking grey area. It’s technically not black-hat but can easily sway in that direction by one small trip, or gust of wind. Not the kind of tightrope act I am willing to risk my business for.
You may know some of the obvious black hat techniques like setting font sizes to zero, keyword stuffing, or hidden links. In the world of websites, and digital marketing, these types of tactics are considered illegal. Businesses are now looking into “Grey Hat Marketing”. These are similar to Black-hat, not “on the naughty list”… yet. These are still tactics that you want to avoid in your business! They may still harm you.
Before we look at what a few of these tactics, note that this article is for informational purposes. JDT Studios does NOT promote, or use any of these tactics. In reality, we have terminated client contracts for clients we have found to use black-hat or asked us too. That’s not how we roll. We would advise you to stay away from companies who may suggest these as good ideas. They may not be “bad”, but they stray away from the idea of ethical business practices.
Negative Nancy
This is the idea to waste time by attacking your competitors, and making them look bad. Don’t you have better things to do?
Squatting
Buy up expired domains names, which are relevant to your keywords and website. Then build landing pages with those domains, and content back links to your site.
Rinse, Redesign, Repeat
To annually “redesign” your site, even if the content is more or less the same, since the code and text changes, Google thinks that this is fresh content… when it's really not.
Comments box Free-For-All
The idea here is that Let everyone and anyone leave comments, replace their links with a “nofollow” tag, which weeds out spam but it adds fresh content on your site.
Pat yourself on the Back…link.
This is whenever you put a comment on any forum; blog, social media post and a link back to yourself.
Facebook for Fluffy
Starting a social media site for your pet pictures, who after time develops an interest in your product or services that link to your website. Who’s going to sue your cat?
Share Crazy
This is when you add social media “like” and “share” buttons everywhere like a crazy person. Then click on them yourself, or have fluffy do it.
Blind Bait and Switch
This one is hard. More effort than I would be willing to put in, but let’s say you promote pencil sharpeners. Develop a site; call it a 'pencil sharpener review weekly'. Find and add all your competitors to the list. After some time of adding fresh content, make a mandatory $10.00 inclusion fee, and then “tattle tail” all the competitor sites on the directory for not paying for links on a site they didn’t even know existed.
Free Money
Some PC magazines (Which will remain nameless) have an AdWords voucher in it. People will set up temporary AdWords accounts, enter the code, and they are on their way to shady free web traffic.
If it’s on the net, it must be true…
Basically here you create BS, or fabricated news stories. Some news websites are hard up and don’t have high moral or authenticity standards. If they bite, these might yourself land a few back links and add to your traffic… you big fat liar!
Fake Generosity
By making a small donation to local charities, then bragging about it, or writing about it online, blowing smoke to the charity about how wonderful they are, then ask them to link back to you as a thank you gives you a one-way ticket to hell. Note, there is nothing wrong with this IF YOU DO IT ETHICLY. Do it for the right reasons!!!! There is nothing wrong with promoting your support.
Keyword Manipulation
This is when you associate two or more grossly unrelated keywords, put them together to try to fool bots into thinking that they are related and make sense… Again… This is way too much effort.
Subscribe to my BS
This can be very very close to the black hat technique of cloaking, you are showing new content to Google ( or other search engines) crawlers, but if you have a subscription based website - even if it’s just a 'click here’ to verify a paricular item. ( age, gender, job type, pet type...) Anyone who didn't select or verify an option would be sent to pages or links with irrelevant, or barely relevant content, other than what was promoted.
Pay to Relocate
This is basically bribery. You basically bribe another person or company to add specific webmaster tools code, and use the 'change of address' and redirect to your website. This is not against the webmaster guidelines (yet).
You Spin Me Right Round…
This is copying content from a different source without giving that source credit. Moving or changing some words around so Google cannot automatically spot the plagiarism.
For example, I am basing this article on content from the blog written in detail from Myke Black, which was written in 2015. At the bottom of this article, you will see credit directed to his work.This is for information only.
Negative or positive… same difference.
When people are researching, they read negative reviews more so than positive ones. This again is going after your competitors.
Review Me, I’ll pay you…
This is self-explanatory.
Free? Did you say free?
Online Voucher codes to use on your site are plentiful. Technically it’s not duplicated content, but you'll attract of traffic. But be careful how often you post this content or the same voucher. It’s in your best interest “ethically” to simply avoid excessive copy and paste. You will find the obsessive copy and paste style on Twitter often.
The list grows quickly, and you can find dozens of the different lists, search to your heart's content. But keep in mind your choice to use these is yours and yours alone. Good luck.
If you are looking for more detailed information, you can Go to Myke Black’s blog and website at http://www.mykeblack.com/.
