What does a blackhat site look like

Yeah. Now that’s a good question. Worth repeating. What does a blackhat site look like?

Short answer. Just like your ordinary, run of the mill, ho-hum webpage. Well, almost.

Long answer. It could look like any other site/page that you’ve seen. It could look just like your site(s). But, it prolly doesn’t.

There are as many different types of blackhat sites as there are types of whitehat sites. We just make them a little differently.

The blackhat portion of our craft takes in two major areas. First is the on-page stuff. Second, the off-page items.

Remember this….almost all of the blackhats that I know (and talk to on a daily basis) are not crooks. They aren’t out to scam anyone. They aren’t into hacking, cracking, warez, or any other illegal activity.

Blackhats are into gaming the search engines. Primarily Google because that’s where the majority of the search traffic on the web comes from. Gaming the search engines is not an unlawful activity. No matter how much Matt Cutts and his bunch of hooligans would like for it to be.

Back on topic….on page factors:

One typical blackhat website is the made for adsense site. MFA for short. The most common MFA is a script generated site that is made up of scraped and/or mixed up text content, surrounded by ppc (adsense, ypn, etc) units. The content is ‘borrowed’ from others or comes from public domain sources. These sites could be a few hundred pages or a few hundred thousand pages.

Another typical blackhat website is made for affiliate income. This type of site comes in several flavors. The first is made the same way as the MFA sites explained above. The difference is that the content is surrounded by affiliate links.

These large script generated sites are very popular. They get their popularity because they are easy and quick to build, because they can target the long-tail keywords very effectively, because they can be duplicated quickly, and because they make money.

The whitehat equivalent of these two types of blackhat sites would be the dynamic catalog sites made from a datafeed. They both use automated scripts to build the individual pages. They both use content from somewhere else.

A blackhat website may be SEO’d a little more than a whitehat site. The on-page factors may push the limits farther than their equivalent wh site.

The biggest difference is in the off-page factors. That should come in another post.

~dink