What Is Black Hat SEO?

Overview
Black hat SEO is a fundamentally different way to approach making money on the internet. Instead of trying to rank for one term that gets 10,000 searches per month, black hat SEO focuses on ranking for 10,000 terms that each get one search per month.

Black Hat Concepts
Before you can understand the concepts behind black hat SEO, you need to have a firm understanding of white hat SEO. Fortunately, the process of building white hat sites can be generalized simply:

1. Pick a few fairly competitive keywords
2. Build pages that target those keywords
3. Get links from directories, articles, and other sites “naturally”
4. Wait for the search engines to rank your pages for your keywords
5. Cash checks

The major differences between black hat and white hat SEO can be found in the approach to steps 1 and 3.

Step 1: Choosing keywords
Instead of choosing a few fairly competitive keywords, black hat SEOs will choose hundreds (or thousands) of extremely uncompetitive keywords. For example, if “buy widget” could be considered competitive, a black hat SEO will target the keywords “buy red widget boston ma”, “buy slightly used blue widget”, etc.

Step 2: Build pages
Now, in step 2 the black hat SEO is going to build a page for every keyword just like the white hat SEO did. However, it would be impossible for them to manually build content for the thousands of keywords that were harvested in step 1. This is why content generation tools have become extremely popular.

Step 3: Get links
Because the site’s content isn’t exactly up to snuff, the black hat SEO can’t submit the site to directories or expect other sites to willingly link to it. However, there are plenty of other ways to get links to your black hat sites: guestbooks, blogs, forums, and wikis all give you the opportunity to get a back link. For more ideas, check out the other WageRank articles on getting links.

Steps 4 and 5
Steps four and five are exactly the same, with the exception that your checks are (hopefully) bigger.

Hopefully you now have a better understanding of what black hat SEO is. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments.

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Comment by Ehab Mehedi

2007-04-12 07:08:44

I think its a great article you have written I posted it on my blog with credits !