What We Learnt From a Pills Link Hacker. This post is a first for me.
First time there is a guest post (well semi-guest) on this site. It also is my first collaboration with one of my favourite Research SEOs Neyne. Neyne (Real name Branko Rihtman) doesn’t blog very often, but when he does it is always worth a read. This is a two part post, the first by Neyne, with the second part by yours truly. My last post was about using Wordpress Plugin Flaws to link build, “aka soft hacking”. Worse Than Blackhat, Meet the Hacker SEO Just like with “SEO is Dead” debate that raises its lame head in seemingly regular intervals over the past few years, so does its not-so-distant cousin, the “Whitehat vs. Just before we dive in, I want to make something clear. It all started with an enquiry of the mentioned friend about one of his client’s sites. Pills Footer This footer does not appear when the site is visited with Googlebot useragent, so my guess is that this is a case of IP cloaking.
Google Cache Header of Haked Site Ranking for V Price 1. 2. Whitehat SEO is a Joke. Posted at Apr 05, 2011|Posted in Rants| By Kris Roadruck| Preface: I actually wrote this post about 3 months ago but elected not to post it because I had an upcoming speaking engagement and didnt want to possibly upset the people that invited me to speak.
Post-Panda-Update & Post-Speaking-Engagement I thought I’d let it see the light of day. Enjoy. Or Don’t You know there was a time I loved calling myself a whitehat. Over time I started realizing that there were only really 2 kinds of white-hats. It’s easy to preach great content when you have a great subject. Once I figured this out I began to flirt with some greyhat techniques. Even still, I continued to participate in my little white hat SEO communities hoping to glean some useful insights or just enjoy the community. If you are charging your clients for service and not being competitive then you are ripping off your clients. Btw, just a little tip: If your main offering is quality content – YOU ARE NOT AN SEO, You are a writer. P.S. SEO Blog from SEOforums.org. This post was inspired by Kris Roadruck’s post yesterday, titled “Whitehat SEO is a Joke” Background: Kris and I both spoke at the recent Distilled Linkbuilding conference’s and shared the same topic “Lessons from the Darkside” – while I filled the slot in London, Kris filled the same slot in New Orleans.
Kris is a proud badge wearing grey hat, I spent years working in poker SEO and know a heck of a lot about black hat tactics, but no longer practice them commercially. You know, there was a time when I called myself a Black Hat, and was proud to be part of THAT community – using automated bulk tools, finding php vulnerabilities, injecting links, mass spam submission, building orphaned pages using poorly constructed search forms, the list goes on (and on). I’ve long preached that people in the white hat community were all unicorn believing naive marketers, with their build it and they will come mentality to linkbuilding which was never going to compete on valuable search terms. White Hat SEO: It F@$#ing Works. The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
I hate webspam. I hate what it's done to the reputation of hardworking, honest, smart web marketers who help websites earn search traffic. I hate how it's poisoned the acronym SEO; a title I'm proud to wear. I hate that it makes legitimate marketing tactics less fruitful. And I hate, perhaps most of all, when it works. Here's a search for "buy propecia," which is a drug I actually take to help prevent hair loss (My wife doesn't think I'd look very good sans hair): Like most search results in the pharma sphere, it's polluted by pages that have artificially inflated their rankings. Marketers and technologists who observe results like this equate SEO with spamming. Spam removes economic and brand value from the search/social/web marketing ecosystem.