Black Hat SEO – Marketing on the Darkside

A long time ago the black hat SEO market was flourishing. These websites were all doing very well, ranking well, positioned well and impossible to overtake. As we all know these days are over, but the problem is these monster SEO websites of the past still exist. The SEO services that use to leverage these questionable markets have not changed.

Black Hat SEO

There is a fine line between white SEO and black hat SEO. This line can be crossed from time to time without taking a hit from Google. Many marketers do cross this line only to come back to the white hat side when the loopholes are closed. It is part of business and a necessary evil for anyone doing business online or offline.

Black hat and white hat must exist together for there to be a balance. Whether you are spiritual or not, these two must exist. If you do not believe me, go back into business history and try to find a time where the black market did not exist. In many instances this market provided new breakthroughs for a lot of new technologies.

Questionable Services

If you still using old services who seem to be doing “business as usual”, you may be still building footprints on these blacklisted sites. Now I am not talking about linking services, I am talking about blog commenting services. In the past these things worked great, but as the business started to dry up, these services started to utilize pornography sites and other questionable resources to gain leverage for their clients. As far as I know about 90% of these websites are now considered to be SPAM ridden and not a good place for your site to show up on.

I would be wary of services that do not contact their clients to explain their position in the market with the newest updates from Google. They may be trying to squeeze out as much as possible from their clients before they shut their doors for good. Now is a good time to contact your service and find out what they are doing with your money you are paying them.

Is your SEO Service Working for You or For Themselves?

The way to find out what your service provider is doing is a two step process. If the service provides a detailed report of all its activities using your websites information, then you have an easy job of reviewing the sites and ensuring they are what you feel are appropriate for your business.

If you do not have a report, it is a little harder to see what is out there, but still doable. First take any non spun content within your title, body of the blog comment or post and search for that through Google, Bing and any other relevant search engines. This will give you a good idea where your comments and posts are landing.

Those sites that are not indexed by Google may show up in other search engines. You may not find all your website content indexed and that is a good thing and a bad thing. For most services that are legitimate you will find that a large majority of your links show up within a search engines index. If they do not show up within one or two months, then there is an obvious issue with the quality of the service. At this point you may want to change services as they may still be using the black hat SEO approach that is no longer acceptable by Google.

At some point your links will fall off the index of Google and others, yet if the service is continually building you solid links from other legitimate sites, then there should be no issues. Do not confuse this method with all the backlinking services that were taken down by Google in the beginning of the year. The services called out in this post do not own the sites they leave your links on.

Some times the site is open and allows commenting and other times there is an agreement between the service and the websites to allow commenting. If the agreement is legitimate, an agreement like this brings relevant comments to a website and also provides the service provider a relevant place to add a client comment.

A Good Way to Move Forward in the Post Panda Era

Word of caution: The services described above should only be used to gain links back to your non money websites. For instance I would only use a service like this to send links to a few of my web 2.0 properties which would then link back to my money site. If one of my web 2.0 sites takes a hit, I just replace it with a new one. This provides a nice buffer for your money site. You can even take it a step further and provide a third layer of protection by adding one more website between your site and your money site.

Here is an example of how to set something up like this:

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