BlackHat SEO in Plain English

This list is in no way comprehensive. Some of it may already be outdated and could potentially get your domains banned from every major search engine on the internet, so use at your own discretion. (It is called blackhat for a reason.)

While we at iD don't necessarily utilize the techniques below, we believe that everyone should at least have access to this information so they are better equipped to understand what SEO is all about and how Google really determines search engine rankings.

Frankly, if your company's search engine optimizers are not implementing at least one of the below linking strategies, your competitors will soon. Like Kosmo Kramer said upon the first public unveiling of his name, "The cat is outta the bag!"



Viral Widget

A viral widget serves two purposes, the first of which is to be attractive enough to be placed on a user's website or profile. The second is to gain a link back to the creator's "money" site.

A viral widget is typically an image, template, or small application that allows the user to embed content into their Facebook/MySpace profile or website. The embedded widget contains a link back to the blackhat's site, giving them valuable in-bound links from a variety of diverse sources. This technique is sometimes called "link laundering" and it's only discouraged by Google if the link back is targeting a site other than the one which the widget was originally downloaded from.

Common examples include badges, free icon sets, mini-games and Facebook applications.



Cloaked Linkbait

Linkbait refers to an article created specifically to be on the front page of user-driven news sites like Digg.com and reddit.com.

Generally, the author creates a solid linkbait article and uploads it to a new domain.

Then that article is submitted to Digg to be tested against other submissions.

If the article receives enough votes to make it to the front page (either through buying votes or organically), the author forwards the URL behind the scenes to their "money" site. So while Digg users see the article correctly, Googlebot spiders are directed to porn and Viagra sites, allowing the author to gain in-bound links to their spammy money sites which would have otherwise gone linkless.




Cloaked Reciprocals

A blackhat SEOer creates an e-mail requesting a reciprocal link exchange to other websites in their niche. Then an e-mail harvester gathers e-mail addresses of niche specific sites. A spam bot is then used to send e-mails out to thousands of webmasters. A simple PHP script is set up on the blackhat's domain that auto-generates a links page to anyone who linked to their site.

When the Googlebot spider looks at the blackhat site, they find that the two-way links created were in fact "rel=nofollow" links, which does not transfer PageRank over to the reciprocal site and gives the blackhat a valuable one-way backlink. (Google's algorithm values one-way links much higher than two-way links.)



Link Buying

Companies with a lot of capital but little online presence can buy keyword targeted text link ads through services such as TextLinkAds, PayPerPost and BuyBlogComments. Buying text links is officially discouraged by Google, but many companies do it anyway to get a jump start on their competition. Link buying is standard operating procedure for many less-than-trustworthy SEO companies nowadays.



Buying Databases

For a nominal fee, it is possible to buy large databases of content (e.g. movie quotes, real estate listings, baseball statistics) and create a script to pull out all of the content and organize it into hundreds of thousands of static pages. One such database reseller is Seocracy.

By channeling link equity effectively around the site, it is possible to pour a lot of PageRank into your long-tail targeted pages automatically.

More information on automatic database content generation.