Turn grey myself or rat on black hat competitors?
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When being trashed by a less than white competitor what do you find most effective:
- lie down with your feet in the air considering a career in gardening?
- turn grey yourself?
- rat on them to Google?
Phil
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I was never much of a gardener.
4. Work hard the right way. Have patience.
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Create new sites, copy their tactics, try out new ones. Ratting to Google will almost never work (too many fish to fry). Seriously, if something is working but is too black-hat for your main property, create another property. You can get a gorgeous wordpress theme for $35, get web hosting for $5/mo and register a new domain for $10, and get 9 articles of content written over at text broker for $5 bucks a pop. Now you have a website up and running for $100 on a new IP address ready to do whatever you want.
Churn and burn. Churn. and. Burn.
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Reporting them to Google will likely only help feed and improve their algorithm and not directly affect the competitor (unless they get audited manually). Turn grey? What is grey is a very grey question... buying links from known sellers and spammy websites as well as spamming yourself is not a long term solution. Doing something clever, that's a different story for as long as you don't push it too far. Gardening actually sounds nice... lol
Seriously though, I can guarantee you that it's possible to beat quantities with quality so keep that creative hat on and work on those link opportunities.
I'm happy to answer specific questions on link building ideas if I get to know a bit more about your situation / industry.
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Haha... Google hates this. I admit though... it's worth a shot. However starting on a new test site is just a messy temporary measure and spend of valuable time and money when both are limited.
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Hey Russ, I'm from a development background so I can knock together a site no problem but I am unclear of the SEO benefit of your suggestion. How is the 2nd site used? Do you mean to use it entirely seperate and unrelated to the main site (ie a sacraficial lamb)? This being the case what do you do in 3 years when the second site, using black hat, has become your main site by sheer numbers (and you have a house built of straw)? I suspect I do not understand what you mean.
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Unfortunately my clients are having a problem with patience and I am having a hard time justifying #4. As I up my SEO game I am even having a hard time believing it myself. Using tools such as OSE I am seeing ever more data that belies this route. It's a murky old world.
Maybe I really should consider gardening. Although it gets a bit cold around here in winter.
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Phew, your guarantee is reassuring. And yes, I know I need to be creative and this may involve a little grey. I feel my SEO education is reaching a point where I understand that there's no such thing as pure white but just staying as clean as you can while achieving results. I very much appreciate your offer and would love some pointers but I am very wary of identifying my problem specifically because I suspect the SEOs trashing me are very well known around these parts. And although their link building involves grey and black it is also terrifyingly awesome: http://www.seomoz.org/q/40-000-high-value-links-sold
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Good questions...
1. How is the 2nd Site Used? The second, third, fourth and so on sites are wholly separate from your first and are used to test gray and black-hat strategies - whether they be paid links, forum profile links, article syndication, directories, comment spam, whatever.
2. What do you do in 3 years...? Let me ask you a counter question. What are you going to do in 3 years when you aren't making any money from your primary site because, like the last 15 years of Google's existence, they still don't have full control over gray and black hat strategies to allow your white hat strategies to work? I'll tell you exactly what you are going to do.
- You are going to laugh your way to the bank while intelligently continuing to reinvest the majority of your profits in your white-hat property.
- You are going to use the knowledge you learned about what links work, what keywords are easier to rank for, etc. to improve your white hat site.
- You are going to suffocate your competitors out of the SERPs as they find it harder and harder to compete against your niche-empire.
- You are going to look back on today and say, hey, that russ guy is fricken awesome. I should buy him a beer. Then you are going to call me up, and I am going to think it is totally weird, but I am a sucker for beer.
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Ok, got it.
It's in my diary - 16th March 2014. Cheers!
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I have to say that for myself, I would never go anywhere close to black hat (or grey) with a website belonging to a customer. There is too much at stake, including my own reputation!
it is more than possible to achieve great results with the right know how - my largest customer has more than 80,000 pages - of these, about 90% of them are on the 1st page for their targeted keywords - of that 90%, about 70% are in the top 2-3.
Trust me, it is more than do-able
Regards,
Andy
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Thanks for your rallying words Andy. I am feeling the squeeze and clearly I am struggling in sustaining faith whilst facing the cloaked and the paid. But ok, it's do-able. When you say never black nor grey I presume you mean really 100% white, entirely within the meaning of Google tos. Not even a shade of grey and it's possible to beat really good black hat? Uh oh there I go again!
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Absolutely 100% white - no shades of grey at all
All of my customer sites are SEO'd to match the Google guidelines and don't go close to anything that be classed as remotely grey (or black).
The things I find make the biggest difference, outside of ensuring the site is up to scratch, is the content. Being a copywriter, I often write entire knowledge bases for customer sites so they have a lot of unique content to share with their customers, via social media sites, to have mentioned in articles, for other sites to link to... the list goes on.
Part of this is down to the fact it is not written for the search engines, but very strong written words for visitors.
Many wont understand just what a difference this can make - coupled with a well put together site = good results.
Regards,
Andy
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lol great response Russ. Attack those blackhats with fire!
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Successful SEO's thrive on those who are afraid of taking risks.
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I just disagree with you. Even at the #1 position, you are missing out on 50+% of the available organic traffic for that keyword. Multi-site strategies are always the right way to go. Seriously, if you really believe that paid linking and black hat link building are dangerous to your and your client's sites, then why in the hell would you have only 1 property that is easily susceptible to a client buying links to and spamming?
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Seo's that take risks with their customers websites have a number of lessons yet to learn. It's like taking your car to the garage and have someone say "let's see what happens when we try a lesser quality petrol into something that is supposed to take premium" Seo's that are successful are those that can deliver measurable results without putting their customers in danger. It's called good business practice.
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You still think that I am talking about the client's primary site.
Look, leave the main site alone - do it all white hat with great content and great links. I am totally on board with that.
Buy why not build 3 other sites and use the techniques that work NOW on them? Seriously, can you give me one strong reason why a webmaster should continue to stand by while Google's algorithm's can't keep up with his competitor's spam?
You keep running the race with 1 horse, and Ill keep running it with 20. We will see who wins.
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So here's a silly thought... Why not build all sites with White hat content and techniques that we know work, and then see who wins?
Look, at the end of the day, there are those that are successful (very) following all guidelines to a tee, have nothing but a string of successes without ever having to tread on territory that comes even close to unethical.
There simply is no need. I am not going to deny that there are black hat techniques that work and might not get found, but why would you take that chance when there is a White hat way of achieving the same results? Results that are going to continue to pay long term.
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Don't get me wrong - We've done both!
Creating satellite assets proved to me a nightmare for us on so many levels it's not funny. From using up resources, splitting up time for creating links across multiple sites to client complaining about the look and feel of all these microsites (they treat them as any other site). I've abandoned the method soon after that and put our resources in link, bait, content and whitehat link building. It gave us the results we needed.
To be fair I recognise some promotional items operators in Australia who have done microsites really well and benefit from it, however most of them have "fed" juice through the main corporate site. To me this is too close to a scheme for comfort.
Another point (this time against the method) is that you're missing out on branding and effectively creating natural links to microsites. If we look at all big brands, their microsites are campaign based. not designed to attract SEO traffic, that's the job of the main site.
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