Don’t Use The Black Hat – Link Building

We all know that building backlinks to our website is very important for search engines. Google will base a great part of your sites ranking on analysis of the sites that link to your site. The quality of the rank, the quantity and the anchor text. The analysis will tell Google how important your site is.

But we all know that link building is not so easy. So maybe you have been thinking of using a easier strategy? Why not pay 200 dollars and get 1000 backlinks in a week.

We all have limited time – so there is a choice to be made between being unethical and ethical link building. And unethical link building is much faster and requires only a minimum of time. Ethical link building on the other hand is hard work and is a long run strategy. We also call the unethical link-building for black hat and the ethical link building for white hat.

 

Black hat strategies
Some webmasters are only looking for traffic and they build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking – and they will disregard the quality of the links, if the websites is relevant and the long-term impact.

One of the worse black hat link building strategy is hacking. Some companies are using computer codes to generate new web pages on existing, high PR domains like .org or .gov domains. Theses new pages will create backlinks to a website will pass on the link juice from the high PR domain. This strategy is very black, very unethical, very illegal and it can be a very dangerous strategy.

Another tool is spam-based link building strategies. Companies are sending out tons of stupid, meaningless, automated blog comments to thousands of blogs. Like my blog here. I think around 80 percent of the comments I get are spam. I have an anti-spam filter and I also try to trash all spam comments if my anti-spam filter is not working.

J.C. Penney (USA company) has a huge online shop for for women’s clothing, men’s clothing, kids, furniture, bedding, jewelry and shoes. J.C. Penny was earlier this year caught in what is considered as a black hat link building strategy. They claim that they need nothing about it – but somebody was spreading their link with anchor text on the Internet – mostly on websites which had no relevance for J.C.Penney. And their strategy seems to work. J.C. Penney got a high number of high volume keywords like “skinny jeans”, “furniture” and “area rugs”. But its still a black hat strategy. You can read about it here in New York Times.

 

Black hat Strategy and Google
Read more about Google Webmaster Guidelines here.

Here is some of the strategies that will get you banned from Google or will negative impact your ranking

• Cloaking
• duplicate content
• Have a robot write your website
• Add keywords that don’t relate to your content
• If you repeat the same keyword multiple times
• Link exchange and bad neighborhoods (Google is calling spamming sites for bad neighborhoods. If you link to a bad neighborhood – it could lower your ranking.
• Title stacking (using the <title> tags for more keywords)
• Hide text (write a lot of white text)
• Distribute viruses, Trojans, or other Badware
• Doorway Pages (pages made only to boost your search ranking)
• Automated Inquiries (like programs checking your ranking)

 

BMW Germany was blocked in 2006

In 2006 Google change BMW’s page rank to zero. BMW was showing a different content to its visitors then it was telling the search engines. That was a violation of the webmaster quality guidelines. So after the page rank was changed BMW no longer appeared on top of the Google search page.

BMW acknowledged in 2006 that the company used doorway pages. Doorway pages are a large sets of papers only made for the search engines with the intention to boost a site’s search ranking.

 

Grey hat strategies
Grey hat strategies include strategies that is not all black and not all white.

• Fake Social Media Account. Maybe somebody has made a fake social media account only for promotional purposes.
• Article spinning is also considered gray hat. It’s good to write as a guest blogger on other websites. A article spinning software will change your words, so the search engines don’t consider your article as a double content.
• Buying blog posts and articles

so gray hat is questionable and not ethical good – but it’s not illegal.

 

Free Marketing Give-away
Remember to grab my free Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2011.

Well enough of black hat, white hat and gray hat strategies. Now its time for my black coffee strategy.
Have a great day all 🙂

 

Henrik