Open letter to the blackhat SEO community.
Dear BlackHat Community,
I was a blackhat SEO before it was called blackhat SEO (I’m apparently old :-)).
I was spamming guestbooks, forums and comments for links before we had tools for automatically SPAMMING links and at the time (pre 2004-2005) it worked really well, I once had a domain (eccomerce site) with a PR8 home page from link spamming with loads of competitive top 3 Google SERPs.
The black hat SEO techniques I used worked really well 10 years ago, made me a lot of money, but the techniques used by the black hat community have evolved and so has Google.
BlackHat SEO
blackhat SEO, not such a good way to do SEO today. It’s not that new blackhat SEO techniques employed by the blackhat community don’t work, there will always be new black hat strategies that work. The problem is while the new techniques have moved on so has Google, Google has got much better at dealing with the black hatters and unless you are always ahead of Google changes you will be caught out eventually.
When I was link spamming over 10 years ago Google was rubbish at spotting link SPAM patterns, took them around two years to penalize the domain I got to PR8 all those years ago and in that time I made more than enough money from the one domain to support a growing family. I saw the penalty coming, but because link SPAM is a semi-permanent technique (the black hatter SEO can’t easily remove all their SPAMMED links) there was nothing I could do to stop the penalty.
The PR8 domain which Google banned over 10 years ago (I still own it, for sentimental reason), over the past 10 years the revenue from the domain wouldn’t pay for a half decent second hand car let alone support a family for a decade. Since then I’ve built many new websites using mostly whitehat SEO techniques (I’m not perfectly white, a little grey around the edges :-)) and was able to buy a house in the UK (we don’t have cheap houses in the UK: think rip off Britain) and pay for it outright in 5 years, been mortgage free for years.
Had I not used blackhat techniques on the PR8 domain I might not have made as much money the first couple of years, but I’d still be making money today. Honestly don’t know if long term I’d have been better off, maybe without black hat comment spamming I’d have never got good Google rankings (learned a lot about SEO using black hat techniques), but it makes you think.
New Black Hat SEO Techniques
Few years later the same and similar blackhat technique didn’t work, Google had made algorithm changes that gave them time to find and penalize most (not all) link spammers BEFORE they had good rankings.
You will note above I wrote “find and penalize most (not all) link spammers”, some fall through the Google SPAM filter nets. If you are thinking about blackhat link spamming because you might get away with it. Would you spin a roulette wheel and bet everything on the number 36?
That’s what you are doing when using blackhat SEO techniques, hoping you are the lucky one that flies under the Google radar.
Odds are you’ll be caught in under a year BEFORE your site ranks for anything seriously competitive. All that hard work, wasted…
If you do decide to go SEO black I strongly recommend avoiding black hat techniques you can’t easily fix, look through the blackhat community forums for those hit with penalties asking how to fix the SEO damage they’ve caused. Black hat Hidden links and blackhat hosted doorway pages when added to domain you control can easily be removed when Google catches you out. With Comment SPAMMING you have no way to delete the links you SPAMMED on others blogs, they could be live for YEARS.
David Law
Website - SEO Gold
Black Hat SEO Tools
To those in the blackhat community which black hat SEO tools do you use and why?
When I was comment SPAMMING for black hat SEO backlinks there weren’t any publicly available SEO tools aimed at blackhat techniques.
There wasn’t the blackhat link SPAM software you can buy today like No Hands SEO and GSA Search Engine Ranker, was pretty much build your own link SPAM tool or manual link SPAMMING.
I got out of using blackhat techniques beyond SEO testing (I regularly test blackhat SEO concepts: I need to know where the grey line is) to see if they work more than 10 years ago, I’m not going to buy something like No Hands SEO just to test the SEO impact of link SPAMMING. Right now I don’t use any blackhat SEO tools.
Very interested to hear from those who make a living using blackhat SEO tactics, which tools do you use and why?
Also interested to hear how blackhat SEO has failed. Like I said in the main blackhat SEO article I had some good success link SPAMMING over a decade ago, BUT it was at a long term cost of loosing an important domain.
Had the domain not been penalized I’d probably be still using blackhat techniques today, it worked, why would I have not continued to use it if Google didn’t have the ability to stop it working.
David
Black Hat SEO Tools
Black Hat SEO Software
Looking for some blackhat SEO’s to test their Black Hat SEO software to test the Stallion Responsive Comment SPAM filters, see Blog Comment SPAM Features for more details.
I used to use Akismet to block comment SPAM and it would filter most SPAM comments to the SPAM folder, but it also caught false positives and with Akismet 3 you had to have Jquery running for their SPAM honeypot to work correctly.
Akismet has two major performance SEO fails.
1. Comment SPAM isn’t blocked before it’s added to the database, this means if your blog generates a 1,000 blackhat link comments a day, that’s 1,000+ database connections etc… to add the comment to the SPAM folder. Until you clear SPAM you could have thousands of comments in your database that are potentially slowing down the MySQL connection.
2. If you don’t have other feature on your WordPress blog that use Jquery (my website doesn’t use Jquery for example), you are loading a 100KB plus JS file (the Jquery file) and a small Akismet JS file. You have a performance hit from having to download 100KB+ for JS files and a hit for downloading Jquery which is render blocking. Jquery is render blocking, what this means is the 100KB plus Jquery file has to fully download before your main content is downloaded. Google PageSpeed Insights Tool throws out a render blocking warning when Jquery is used on a blog.
There’s other issues with Akismet I won’t go into, result was Akisemt had to go.
I dropped Akismet almost 2 months ago, at the time I could receive over 1,000 SPAM comment a day on this site. I’d built some new SPAM comment filter features into Stallion Responsive 8.1 and it decapitated the amount of SPAM I had to deal with.
I’ve gone from up to 1,000 SPAM comments added to the SPAM folder by Akismet a day to some days none. On an average day I’ll see a comment or two in the moderation queue that’s SPAM and nothing in the SPAM folder.
The Stallion Responsive SPAM filters prevent SPAM comments being added to the database, so no performance hit.
Only issue I’ve had is with the WordPress security nonce I was using on comments forms. I didn’t realise the nonce had a 24 hour time frame (actually 12 hours really) which means you can’t use a caching plugin which sets the HTML cache longer than 12 hours. I use W3 Total Cache and I was working on squeezing out better performance and had increased the HTML browser cache to above 12 hours (the default is under 12 hours) and this means the nonce was cached too long and stopped real comments (fixed now).
My next Stallion Responsive Update (will be 8.2, working on it now) will include an option to have or not to have the security nonce, basically set the browser cache above 12 hours, don’t use the WordPress nonce.
Anyway, to blackhat SEO’s I think Stallion Responsive can prevent most automated comment SPAM software, so would like to see some real blackhat SEO software testing by actual black hat comment SPAMMMERS.
My filters won’t catch manual comment SPAMMERS unless they are really dumb and make mistakes that trip the filters: put your email address in the address form and another form field and it trips a SPAM filter for example.
David
Black Hat SEO Software