Slightly Shady SEO | Blackhat is Back, Baby.

Ok. So after the dramabomb that was yesterday, I thought I’d drop a more traditional entry. The guide here is going to be essentially for people that are constantly worried about the big G getting wise to their tactics. Especially with Google’s recent “shading in” of most whitehats by killing off even widget bait, more and more people are getting worried. Even for non blackhat sites. Some of these tips require sacrifice, so it’s up to you to weigh out the cost/reward.

Oh yeah, and this is for people who DO buy links, or DO have sketchier tactics.

1. Pseudo-Linkbait - Linkbait is one of the few secure channels for getting links into your site, so long as it’s on-topic. But here’s the dirty little secret: It’s also a great channel for funneling spammed or paid links. It’s much more believable that people were linking out to your linkbait than to your home page, so why not buy a few links going there? Who knows, maybe it will even build up to semi-viral at some point from the people seeing it. The day Google penalizes because “Your linkbait wasn’t good enough” is the day I move to Russia and pull out the super black hat.
2. I Will Smack you 1 Time For Every Sitewide Link You Have - If your site is on Free Credit Reports, or something that REALLY is not of any interest to people in reality(yeah, credit related sites don’t get e-groupies, deal with it). It would appear sitewide links are very much discounted, and beyond that, it’s a massive “THIS IS NOT A NATURAL LINK” flag. Overall, not worth it in my opinion.
3. Be Creative on the Context of your Links - If you’re buying, spamming, or link farming your own links, you probably have control over how stuff is worded. So if you’re in a high competitive niche, talk trash about yourself sometimes. “I tried to sign up for a free credit report, but that company hasn’t gotten back to me yet! What the heck?”. So long as you don’t mention your own company name in the text, no one will ever realistically relate the entry to your site, and for a competitive field they’ll never rank and become your PR problem. But that context is infinitely more believable than a 500 word blog entry on credit reports.
4. Negotiate Unique Links - If you’re soliciting sites for links and paying them, ask them how much it would cost(1 time payment) to not get them to sell more links off that site. It will break your financial bank a bit, but while you know you’re not stupid and will probably float under the Google radar for a bit, you cannot say the same thing for every other idiot with $20 that they sell links to.
5. Separate this Site from Your Others - Use a different registrar, different name, different host, different everything. Matt Cutts has said before that webmaster with a blackmark on their record may be looked at a bit more skeptically than others with a clean slate.
6. Stealth Redirecting - Definitely one of my favorites, but a bit on the grayhat side to be sure. Use caution. Create separate clone sites with similar site structure. Build links to them with your higher risk tactics(don’t waste money on them though). Tell Google to shove off, and deny them in robots.txt. After all, it’s not their business what you do if you’re telling them to stay the hell out of your site.
   Anyways, after you’ve built up your sketchball links, redirect those pages INDIVIDUALLY to your new, real site. Yahoo and MSN will follow it, and after MSN hits it the 10,000 times necessary to conclude that yes, you are in fact redirecting, you should get a decent bump in their search engines. But since Google isn’t even allowed to access the site, those sketch arse links never come into question.
   However: Make sure you do NOT redirect robots.txt. That’s why I said individual pages. Google still checks on robots.txt at times, and you want to make sure it doesn’t get sent to your new one. Not sure how that would work, but I also don’t want to find out.
7. Observe the “Top 1000″ Rule - Remember that a LOT of the bannings/penalizations that occur nowadays are due to competitors reporting your site. If you can garner a few REALLY strong links organically(1000 may be a bit optimistic) you’re golden. Yahoo is the only remaining useful backlink checker, and they max out at 1000 links. So if you can keep that first page(or as many as possible) clean, what happens past your 1000th link in Yahoo doesn’t exist to the world. While for many people this may not sound reasonable, getting mentioned in something along the lines of an AP news wire could easily give a substantial bump into that 1000. Yeah, this tip is hard. Get over it.

-XMCP

Posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 12:17 pm in the category:backlinks, seo. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.