Hi Everyone
I hope you don’t mind if I have my say as well.
For one I think Professor has made a very valid statement, Blackhat SEO’s is damaging the industry and we should look them in the eye and say this is enough. I also feel that affiliate programs should make a point of specifically mentioning this in their Terms & Conditions.
Dominique I also feel that you have a valid point these affiliate programs that clearly support Blackhats should make their choice. Either the one or the other.
I would also like to comment to Stupid. You have a valid point that it is difficult to classify someone’s actions as being blackhat and for some reason there is many SEO’s that disagreed on this point. For me there is no thin line infact the question is easy to answer(please note that is for me). If an SEO in any way intentionally cheat a SE algo in order to obtain high rankings that is defined as Blackhat. Now the argument will probable push into this direction… But if a webmaster intentionally increases his back links (or something similar) he is also intentionally trying to cheat the SE algo blah blah… The age old argument. However there is a clear line. Widget baiting, scraping and cloaking to mention a few is clear blackhat techniques. Whitehats just work hard at improving there rankings the legit way, by giving it the quality it wishes to have without cheating. I am sorry if this sounds like an argument, Stupid but that is not the intention, I am truly just giving my opinion. I have had this argument way to many times with other SEO’s in forums and the last thing I want is a discussion about this, I hardly think that was Professor’s intention with this thread. lol However, Stupid I would love to get your comments on this issue, as I have asked Cheza to review our Terms and Conditions so we can possibly add this to our terms and conditions at Moneymechanic. I would truly appreciate your input.
Let’s look at the disadvantages and advantages of the two hats. As usual Webscaz had a very valid point. It is simply not worth it to go over to the dark side, for the following reasons. Blackhat SEO is a science and I mean a real science, in many cases they are much better than Whitehats as they are in a continuous struggle against the well educated teams of the SE’s. They are also completely without any conscience, as they strongly believe they are doing nothing wrong with their cheat techniques. They feel it is purely business. However Blackhat SEO’s also loves the challenge of outsmarting other people and can in many cases be compared to hackers. To say it is business is actually stupid as Blackhats provide the casinos with badly targeted players that often do not convert. In numbers terms they probably need to supply about 7 times the traffic you need to supply to obtain the same amount of conversions. They also need to completely rely on the casino’s ability to keep the players and create loyalty. Therefore the blackhat SEO is spending much more time in order to obtain the same amount of conversions, that lasts for a much shorter time as most visitor soon relies they did not end up at the result they wanted.
There is one thing I do however in an attempt to stay up to date with their strategies. I keep on monitoring their forums and researching their techniques. Often this can also help you improve your knowledge and become true SEO Jedi without moving to the darkside.
Professor I don’t advocate blackhat SEO and if you feel this is damaging for this thread Please remove this, There is number of tools used by Blackhats, for scraping (as far as I know) they use Traffic Equalizer You will have to Google that though as I do not wish to link to it. There is a number of cloaking scripts freely available and RSS Mixing tools.