An Eye On Black Hat SEO/Us

I recently waded through 4,000+ threads on a black hat SEO forum - that's about a month's worth of postings. I wasn't sure going into this effort if my time would be rewarded with useful information, but there was no other way to find out aside from actually taking the plunge. While I'm probably going to regret admitting it, I did actually learn something new and useful.

What Black Hatters Think About?
The big themes that emerged from my reading weren't too surprising. Among the most common were:

Knowing that I'm going to get caught, how do I automate my efforts so that I can repeat them as often as necessary while keeping my ROI positive?


What tactics can I use (deceptive or otherwise) to obtain rankings in Google? (On a related note, not one post mentioned Bing or Yahoo.)

Common problems reported in the forum included being banned from AdSense, AdWords, and Facebook. Although failures are more likely to be reported than successes, the number of posts does suggest that Google and Facebook are actively banning users. On the "shaking my head in disbelief" front, there were stories from those that had put their savings into efforts that failed, such as the guy that mortgaged his motorcycle and then couldn't make the payments. There were also ridiculous posts like the guy that needed to remove thousands of automated back links because of being banned by Google or the guy asking for a $5,000 investment so he could try out an idea he had.

Curiously, there was very little being discussed around on-page SEO. In fact, a couple of threads clearly stated the opinion that in the black hat world (as defined by this forum's participants), it's all about links with on-site techniques having next to no value. I'm not sure if this means that these posters have given up on cloaking or just don't know how to use it effectively.

This leaves us with off-site SEO (i.e., link development). In this area, the most common tactics included link wheels, link pyramids, web 2.0 links, along with the ever-popular forum and blog comment spam. No one had any illusions about the risks of such techniques, but most felt that such risks could be mitigated by linking to middle tiers, which in turn would link to their money sites.

While I'm not surprised to have read it, there were many posts about buying tweets, "likes," Google +1's, and Yelp reviews. Sellers of these services always assured buyers that there were real people behind the accounts and none of it was automated. Right.
What Can We Learn From Black Hat SEO Forums?
As I mentioned at the beginning of this column, I did actually pick up some tips from reading the thousands of threads. Part of that learning was a reminder of all of the sneaky tricks that competitors (i.e., those ranking above the sites I work on) might be employing.

Most of the rest of what I learned fell into the tactical bucket rather than being big strategies that could be applied

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