Slightly Shady SEO | Blackhat is Back, Baby.

In the land of SEO, different niches require incredibly different tactics to turn a profit or rank. So how does one decide how to push a website?
Note: Some of these things I decide to use blackhat sites. For whitehats, you may want to substitute in messageboards or article-based sites in for scraper sites.

• Examine the Top 10 In The Niche (To Learn, not to report them you pansy)
  Different niches have different standards to live by, and different things that Google will overlook(for a time). A lot of sites use blatantly purchased(or even spammed) links and rank for years, simply because every other site in that niche do the same. Averaging the top 10′s methods are a good way to find “acceptable practice” for that niche.
• Is There a Community Based Around This Topic?
  If so, get your viral engines crankin. Become an active member of their message boards for a week or so before your linkbait post. The more of a community there is based around your chosen topics, the less they’re going to use search engines. Word of mouth, and memory of important websites is terribly important. Beyond that, community means a centralized place to get your diggs, votes, etc. Almost every community has a gripe as well. Some message they want to “get out” to the world. Take advantage of that.
  If your linkbait doesn’t work, concentrate your efforts on ranking the messageboard threads you posted into. If they have a link to your page, who cares?
• Evaluate Your Own Abilities
  Don’t think you could rank for “mortgage quote” 100% whitehat? I’ll admit that I’m pretty positive I couldn’t (without an exorbitant budget). Then perhaps it’s time to loosen up, and do what’s necessary to play with the big dogs.
• Evaluate the Longtail Potential
  For me, when deciding whether to make a site white/gray/blackhat, one of the deciding factors is if I think there will be a considerable amount of longtail in the topic. For example “Skittles”. I cannot imagine what the hell someone would append onto the word “skittles” that would make for a decent longtail. Now “Skirts”? Completely different. Sizes, manufacturers, styles, prices, stores, all of these get wrapped up into the longtail category. Sounds like a lovely BH site to me
• Categorize Your Competitors
  If you’re going to be trying to beat someone for a keyword, it’s important to figure out how much scrutiny your site will be under.
  • So first off, decide if they were using a professional SEO service that may be examining their rankings to see who is beating them. Chances are an ongoing SEO service is going to keep checking up on them. If you need to check to see if there’s ongoing SEO, you can monitor the site on your own for a bit. try searching for the domain name every day on Google, restricting to results within the last 24 hours. Also, watching them through Yahoo Site Explorer doesn’t hurt.
  • Second, take a look at the people ranking at the top. Does it seem like they get all their hits(or the majority) from the keyword you’re targeting? If so, they’ll probably examine you if you invade their top 10. Places like Kohls/Walmart/Amazon/Wikipedia are much safer in this regard. Losing traffic in a single topic is not enough to throw off the flags.

There’s a lot further you can go with this topic. Use your imagination

Regards,
XMCP

Posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 1:55 pm in the category:affiliate marketing, seo. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.