Blackhat 3.0 or what
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve prolly noticed that I generally don’t use the term(s) Black Hat SEO, or Blackhat SEO.
The reason for that is simple. Well, simple for me. I believe that bh seo is dead. It’s no longer a descriptive term with an accurately identifiable entity.
Say what?
The BlackHat portion of the SEO stuff isn’t black any longer. The term itself is outdated and should be changed to something else. What that would be I don’t know.
The only real difference (in SEO) between the webmasters who call themselves black hats and those that think they are white hats is the speed and volume that the bh brings to bear.
The ‘Tightie Whities’ (those spammers who don’t think what they do is black, and tell the world how bad the bh’s are.) go out looking for links. They put mighty efforts into making sure their pages are SEO’d to the max.
A Blackhat just does it with automation, scripts, and brute force. The page is optimized, but with much higher counts of keywords. Backlinks are obtained by the thousands instead of by ones and twos.
It’s like different sides of the same coin. So, that’s why I think the BlackHat side of the SEO equation is dead in the water.
BlackHat itself isn’t dead. It is growing and evolving. Daily.
There has been a recent (within the last six months or so) explosion of scripts and books on the subject of Black Hat stuff. This phenomenon has brought a lot more people into the fold. That’s fine. The internet is huge.
The scripts aren’t a new idea either. But, the authors of the effective spamming scripts usually kept the distribution small. Say, 150-250 copies is all they would sell. That kept the techniques unique enough that money could be made for quite a while.
The newer programs don’t have such a limitation and it will be bad for all of us.
The world of the BH is changing. The search engineers are getting the message quicker and slipping in new algos faster. The proliferation of spam links from certain scripts will soon cause new problems. So, huge numbers of backlinks could go up in smoke any day now.
Loss of backlinks equals loss of position. Loss of position equals loss of income. Loss of income equals . . . . .
So, how are we going to compensate for fewer backlinks?
One way would be to make sure we have lots of trusted links. That’s the wh way and would take a very long time if you have a few sites to look after.
Another approach involves cloaking. You know, giving the SE one set of data and the customer a different set. Blackhats have been doing this for quite a while. Some, maybe even, most simply redirect the customer elsewhere. It’s effective and I have used it, but not much.
I believe that one way that the blackhat’s will evolve is with more emphasis on cloaking.
If a page is heavily optimized for the engines (keyword stuffed) it would take fewer backlinks to get it ranked for most of the terms. The problem is how to reliably deliver your desired content to the customer.
There are some interesting cloaking concepts floating around. I’ll look at some and see what I can find that may fit in with this post.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, what else? What other areas of blackhat do you see changing? Are some concepts outmoded?
Your input and discussion would be greatly appreciated.
~dink
Comment by Nick
As weird as this sounds, I think that quality is an area that is constantly improving in Bh. It used to be that you slap up some sh*t site, toss a few links at it and collect your adSense check. Now, bHers are creating smarter synonymizers for smarter scrapers that pump quality content to good looking blogs/sites. Seocracy hit the nail on the head with his comparison of two scraper sites on http://seocracy.com/posts/show/14 … The more well designed sites, that have more human-readable content, are going to attract more clicks … this is a no-brainer, but something that the automated tools and scripts that bHers use are getting better at producing.
Comment by Dink
Doesn’t sound weird to me Nick. I think you’re right on.
The old days are gone for ever. If we don’t evolve, we’ll be like the big lizards. Just memories and bones.
There sure enough is a need for quality in our content. I’ve suffered a hand job before. It is for that reason that I have stopped random scraping.
I look over my text before I paste it. I also write a lot of my own stuff. You’d be surprised at how many pages you can build if you write 7-10 pages then markov and synonomize them. Even if you scraped an articles site, you still need to do some massage work before it reads good enough to pass the hand job test.
I think (maybe) a combination of great content, for both the spider and for the customer, and good cloaking could result in some long-lasting and profitable pages.
Comment by taky
Sorry, but I really have to disagree with scraper/Adsense sites. I do, however, believe that it is harder to get into the big G and actually stay there with a bunch of spammy pages. However, if you still have unique content that is keyword dense, and good linking structure and indexing methods (even linkspam at your joint pages) it is very very possible to toss up thousands of sites and collect an Adsense check every month. Hell, I do it, and have been doing it for a few months.
You just have to be a little smarter about it nowdays, and as G gets better and better at deciphering bullshit from real content, you have to get better at manipulating them and distributing the linkjuice that you can conjure up from your bullshit guestbooks and forum signups/post spams.
Where there is a will there is a way, but I am definitely not in a position to argue that cloaking is the future of Blackhat. I think cloaking is huge, and if done correctly with the right SEO knowledge you can reap some pretty sick cash.
Anyway, just my two cents.
Comment by Dink
Ya, Taky. Smarter and somewhat faster to do flip-flops too.
I’m still investigating the cloaking stuff. I’ll post some links before long.
Comment by taky
ill keep you bookmarked
Comment by DesiNet
Hi everyone.
Taky is Gay.
Comment by roguespammer
I heard he was gay, then some one said he was a woman. Maybe he’s a cross dresser, that explains it. Yep thats it.