Can somebody tell me if this is a black hat tactic??

[tguide]

I'm new to SEO, so somebody needs to explain to me what is kosher or not.

Playing around with opensiteexplorer I came across a network of websites that all link together from a page of links, only the linking page is hidden to the viewer, with an empty anchor tag or something small like a period.

example http://zinasdayspa.com/ links to http://zinasdayspa.com/links_baltimore_hair_salon_day_spa_fells_point_federal_hill_canton_maryland.phpwith a tag at the very bottom, that links to http://www.6611111.com.

It's interesting because some of these websites rank high with google, but when I do link:http://www.6611111.com, google shows no results!

Something very strange is about this, and I wanted to know how http://www.6611111.com ranks so high for such a competitive keyword such as stop smoking, and if this is blackhat. My intuition tells me it is, but I'm also curious how it ranks high.

[trainSEM]

This linking isn't black-hat -- it is simply old-school SEO with the use of a Links page, which has long been noted as a red flag. Note that the links page shows a grey bar for the Toolbar PR, suggesting that Google has noted it as a links page. Most of those sites are off-topic for this hair salon, so the link juice is wasted and the page has become irrelevant for its ostensible purpose.

I cannot see 6611111.com ranking for "stop smoking" in the first 400 results, You might be seeing personalised results, so use an incognito browser and clear your cookies and cache. Log out of all Google services before running the search.

[tguide]

I was away so couldn't respond to this.

Thank you very much for the response. Actually I wrote the 'stop smoking' from memory, but if I do 'stop smoking hypnosis', another highly competitive keywords, it shows on the 2nd page,

If this is a red flag tactic, how do they rank so high for such a competitive words???

Thanks

[tguide]

Just an update. I showed this to a friend of mine who is a SEO expert. He also doesn't know either.

[Paddy_Moogan]

I'd agree with what Ash said in that this technique isn't strictly speaking "black hat" - although the definition of black hat is open to interpretation! I checked their backlink profile on Open Site Explorer and found lots of evidence of this tactic being used lots and lots of targeting of exact match anchor text:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.6611111.com%2F

This level of exact match anchor text is probably the reason they are ranking for various keywords. However this is the type of link building that Google doesn't particularly like, at least not when it makes up the majority of your link profile. So I'd expect it to stop working for them at some point once Google figure it out properly and reduce the value of those links.

I hope that helps a bit!