White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat
This is something that gets people fired up fairly easily. There are webmasters out there making a lot of money online without resorting to any sleazy methods in order to get there. On the other hand there are people out there that will do anything possible to get visitors to their site and extract money from them. Search Engine Cloaking is one example of a black hat Search Engine Optimization technique.
Personally I don’t recommend black hat techniques, nor do I use those methods myself. I am in this for the long-term and the last thing I want is to ruin it. Cloaking for example will get your site banned from google if they catch you doing it. Sure you can probably get away with it for a while and manage to pull in a few dollars rather quickly, but once they do find out it is all over and your domain name is esentially garbage. I spend a lot of time building my sites, so I have a fairly large investment in most of them, and anything that will risk screwing up that investment is not worth considering.
Many SEO experts will tell you.. “forget SEO, go build a site with content and the search engines will take care of the rest themselves.” This is partially true. If you have good content you significantly increase the chances of people finding your site just by having lots of keywords and phrases sprinkled around on your site. Unfortunately this isn’t quite enough. You need incoming links to your site. There are both white hat and black hat methods of acquiring incoming links.
Black Hat Link Building
Some people use automated software that posts thousands of spam comments to blogs all over the world. Fortunately most blog comments have nofollow tags in urls, making this mostly useless for search engine purposes these days. Another method used is the cloaking as mentioned above. These automated programs can build thousands and thousands of interlinked pages with keywords sprinkled all over them. This will definitely help ranking for certain keywords within your site, but won’t help externally. Another thing is that if people find out you are cloaking they are likely to report you since they most likely won’t agree with it.. especially if they’re trying to take your spot on the search engine results page (SERP). Another thing I’ve seen is to create thousands and thousands of sites and link them all together. Luckily Google caught on to this a long time ago and takes into consideration the class C block the sites are in..so creating a ton of sites excessively linked together that are part of the same IP Block is going to get noticed. Google assumes they are owned by the same entity and penalizes them appropriately.
White Hat Link Building
There are many ways to gain legitimate incoming links to your site. I’ve written about this already in the “phase documents” in the section about web site promotion. The main methods are 1) Create a site people just want to link to, 2) Exchange links with other sites, 3) Buy directory listings or other text links, 4) Submit to free directories. Don’t rely too heavily on any one method since search engines are constantly changing and may devalue directory listings in the future. If Google figures out how to tell what links are paid for you can bet they’ll start penalizing those sites too.
In conclusion I’d like to say please avoid black hat SEO. You make the rest of us look bad, and it will never work out in the long run! Unless you start the next million dollar home page, the chances of starting from scratch and making millions within a matter of months are pretty slim, but with some work and quality content you will see results, just be patient..
~Wealthy Webmaster