Jul 10 2008
Being forced into the Gray Hat Seo Arena
With internet marketing and seo for better search engine ranks, there is a white area, black area a big fat gray area. Sometimes we are forced to step into the gray to keep up with the competition. Say you sell golf shirts online. You have a great product, low prices, great service and a great website. Is that going to be enough to get seen on the 1st page of yahoo or Google.
Google’s Concern with paid links:
One of Google’s main concerns are website owners’ buying links for the link juice along. I’ve come across a couple Pr8 sites related to programming which sell links for about 2k a year. Next thing you know mortgage companies are buying them. Do they figure programmers are looking to refinance? All this mortgage company was concerned about is PR and link juice.
When purchasing links is needed:
If your selling in a competitive market you may need to use some gray hat seo strategies. If your working your site with angel seo tactics and your site comes as high as the 8th page of the search engine results what good will this do for your business. You may get a couple visits here and there while all your “link buying” competition is building great organic search traffic and making the sales. To get closer to the 1st page results you may need to put your site closer to that edge and buy some links. If all the competitors buying links and your buying links, if and when Google comes up with that great algorithm to penalize every single websites buying links, yea sure, wont everyone go down together in turn not changing what shows in the results all that much. The website that will be left ranking high will be the site took much care in the natural appearance of purchased text links. It’s not always a bad idea to buy a link with the anchor text “click here”. Looks good and natural. It will never be seen as a paid link unless it’s under a sidebar just beneath a title reading “Paid Links” or something similar. If you do decide you need to purchase some links, the trick is to get them looking as natural as possible and to only buy from websites closely related.
Building Links with Care
If you were writing in a blog and wanted to tell someone about a great service you use online, how would you write it? Could you write about the service and manage it to use good anchor text while still maintaining that natural look. Playing your seo smart is going to set you apart from the competition. Avoid going out and purchasing a thousand links with the same anchor text. Search engines have a number of automated programs that will raise red flags to their search engine staff when something fishy happens. When you work in a link somewhere to your page think to yourself, can me doing this be easily sniffed out be some program made by the top programmers working for Google. You need to remember, they’re building tools on a daily basis to sniff these things out so don’t underestimate them. Tools to detect blog and forum spam were probably created years ago. Avoid this strategy. This goes for guest book spam also. How hard would it be for some search engine programmer to build a tool which will query all website links found on 20 or more guest books. Ever hear of the phrase, “stay under the radar”. If it’s undecided whether a new link building idea will work great or be sniffed out and labeled spam, put a limit on the amount of times you use the method. Build a couple links and move on.
I’ll conclude this post with 3 Link Building Guidelines
All end this post by saying, work your way up through the search engine ranks by building a great page and keeping seo strategies as white hat as possible even though the competition factor within your industry may push you into the gray hat arena.
- Always avoid black hat tactics because they’ll come back to bite you.
- Be innovative, build unique link building methods and procedures.
- Make a fair offer to a related pages untouched by the competition.
