Why White Hat SEO Still Fails To Get It

[Scritty]

Still, you black hat guys will get hit in the end

Read this places? Seen this around? Sure you have, we all have, and there is nothing new here
Now pop over to Google webmaster forums and take a look at REALITY!

Go on - I'll be here when you get back. Take a look at those asking for help after getting a slap in the recent Penguin update. Have a close look at their sites, their SEO methods and their claims. See how many of them talk about their trust rating "Why have I been slapped I haz really high trust" (trust is a Moz thing - the correlation between these butthurt White Hatters and Moz memberships is staggering

Back? Good. A quick refresh

Will get hit in the end...

Really? What time scale are we talking here? Sites have lasted well over a decade (since Google) with what amounts to gamed link building. Still here today. They ranked in Alta Vista, Lycos and Yahoo in the 90's and are still ranking high today based on effective (Blue/Gray - maybe a touch of black) hat SEO

Depends on what "sooner or later" means and who you are applying the logic to.
Effective SEO is needed to rank in tough high commercial niches if you go the SEO route instead of generating traffic other ways (and I do recommend generating traffic other ways as well, but that's a different post)

The sort of homeopathic watered down crap that Fishkin and the like support is neither effective nor 100% safe because

a) Sites are extremely unlikely to rank with it in very hard niches and
b) They are almost as likely to get slapped if you do ever rank than a gamed site (if gaming was done properly) because
c) Google don't like ANY OFFSITE SEO. There is no such thing as Google approved offsite SEO. You create a link no matter how manual, exchange, begging another webmaster whatever for ranking purposes? You are outside Google's guidelines.

You either play the game or you don't. To my mind pure WH SEO in tough niches is not even playing the game. It's hoping to win the lottery but not buying a ticket.
Finally. If making money is the aim (and for the vast majority of people on BHW that's what it boils down to) Who really cares about permanent.
$10,000 a month starting January 2015 but wiped out January 2020 is still over half a million dollars
Better than still trying to rank in 2020 - and then maybe getting wiped out anyway.
Because Google isn't fair, it's often wrong, and it puts itself first.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I go to GWMF and read all the butt-hurt White Hat site owners getting slapped down by the arseholes Google allow to moderate those forums.

Smarmy Google Endorsed Drektoid 1: "Yeah - no wonder, your access.php file has some really bad permissions set and all sorts of vulnerabilities there"
Slapped Site Owner:"What's that got to do with getting an offsite linking penalty"
Smarmy Google Endorsed Drektoid 1:"I'm saying your site is not up to standard and that's before I even look at your linking profile"
Slapped Site Owner:"Again, what's that got to do with getting an offsite linking penalty"
Smarmy Google Endorsed Drektoid 1:" Hey Smarmy Google Endorsed Drektoid 2, come and have a look at this guys crap site and help me ridicule him"
Sound of slapped site owners tears as he realizes he's just fodder to the admin "piss taking" machine.

I wish this wasn't so close to the truth. Google WMF admins (many of them pornographers really - I'm not making this crap up) enjoy hammering on people and seem to be chosen to be socially inadequate arse holes of the first degree. They are your White Hat knights in shining armour - and see how they hammer on WH SEO guys whose sites got hammered?

Meanwhile effective SEO guy has 15 sites still ranking and new ideas to rank and bank popping up and isn't wasting time talking to these moronic power-mad pricks

Would you rather make a few thousand a month for a year or two - or safely make fuck all forever!
Does that question deserve a fraction of a second to consider?

Go to it brothers. Play the game right. Take care, have fast feet, build in contingency and redundancy. Stay cost effective, plan for failure at some point. But above all remember. No matter how pious these WH evangelists are - their ineffective ranking techniques are almost as likely to get hammered as yours - and in the mean time you are coining it!

 

[neo]

So true.

Ever since Google started make up for their failed algorithm by giving unfair advantage to few authority sites, it was not a fair game for whitehat webmasters anymore. And if their stupid algo drops a big site from serps and it becomes a news, the monkeys at google do a manual adjustment.

But until someone else comes up with a better search engine which truly gives credit to quality content, google is going to milk every penny.

 

[Zevoltai]

Quality post from Scritty as usual

 

[nikchaing]

10/10 read it 3 times

 

[Jet Black]

So many people say better be all or mostly white hat with your important sites to guarantee their ?safety?, to prevent having them slapped by google. But lots of 100% white hat webmasters get slapped, and google offers no guarantees to anyone. I guess it is the ideal of having a permanently ranking site that keeps people thinking in this way, since wh offers a seemingly much more safe option than bh. If you spend a lot of time to build an authority site, you really want it to rank for the long-term (but unfortunately white hat approach cannot guarantee that).

Still, the white hat propaganda machines (moz, matt cutts, etc) manage to create an unwavering goodwill for white hat. The white hat crusaders seemingly don?t change their view no matter how many wh sites they see get taken down by big g. Their response often seems to be more along the lines of trying to be even more white hat.

 

[TacticalTechZone]

Great read, and so true. Forget this black or white dogmatic thinking.

A good SEO should have a versatile skillset.

That means he should be able to go out and do some outreach to get some guest posts, then go build a high quality pbn, write an amazing press release, publish it, and then go fire up GSA and black hat that shit all the way to page 1.

If you're adhering too much to either side, white or black...IMO you are missing a huge chunk of the game.

why not go for the whole ball of wax.

be an ALL hat SEO.

 

[aposterioris]

Read this places? Seen this around? Sure you have, we all have, and there is nothing new here
Now pop over to Google webmaster forums and take a look at REALITY!

Go on - I'll be here when you get back. Take a look at those asking for help after getting a slap in the recent Penguin update. Have a close look at their sites, their SEO methods and their claims. See how many of them talk about their trust rating "Why have I been slapped I haz really high trust" (trust is a Moz thing - the correlation between these butthurt White Hatters and Moz memberships is staggering

Back? Good. A quick refresh


Really? What time scale are we talking here? Sites have lasted well over a decade (since Google) with what amounts to gamed link building. Still here today. They ranked in Alta Vista, Lycos and Yahoo in the 90's and are still ranking high today based on effective (Blue/Gray - maybe a touch of black) hat SEO

Depends on what "sooner or later" means and who you are applying the logic to.
Effective SEO is needed to rank in tough high commercial niches if you go the SEO route instead of generating traffic other ways (and I do recommend generating traffic other ways as well, but that's a different post)

The sort of homeopathic watered down crap that Fishkin and the like support is neither effective nor 100% safe because

a) Sites are extremely unlikely to rank with it in very hard niches and
b) They are almost as likely to get slapped if you do ever rank than a gamed site (if gaming was done properly) because
c) Google don't like ANY OFFSITE SEO. There is no such thing as Google approved offsite SEO. You create a link no matter how manual, exchange, begging another webmaster whatever for ranking purposes? You are outside Google's guidelines.

You either play the game or you don't. To my mind pure WH SEO in tough niches is not even playing the game. It's hoping to win the lottery but not buying a ticket.
Finally. If making money is the aim (and for the vast majority of people on BHW that's what it boils down to) Who really cares about permanent.
$10,000 a month starting January 2015 but wiped out January 2020 is still over half a million dollars
Better than still trying to rank in 2020 - and then maybe getting wiped out anyway.
Because Google isn't fair, it's often wrong, and it puts itself first.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I go to GWMF and read all the butt-hurt White Hat site owners getting slapped down by the arseholes Google allow to moderate those forums.

Smarmy Google Endorsed Drektoid 1: "Yeah - no wonder, your access.php file has some really bad permissions set and all sorts of vulnerabilities there"
Slapped Site Owner:"What's that got to do with getting an offsite linking penalty"
Smarmy Google Endorsed Drektoid 1:"I'm saying your site is not up to standard and that's before I even look at your linking profile"
Slapped Site Owner:"Again, what's that got to do with getting an offsite linking penalty"
Smarmy Google Endorsed Drektoid 1:" Hey Smarmy Google Endorsed Drektoid 2, come and have a look at this guys crap site and help me ridicule him"
Sound of slapped site owners tears as he realizes he's just fodder to the admin "piss taking" machine.

I wish this wasn't so close to the truth. Google WMF admins (many of them pornographers really - I'm not making this crap up) enjoy hammering on people and seem to be chosen to be socially inadequate arse holes of the first degree. They are your White Hat knights in shining armour - and see how they hammer on WH SEO guys whose sites got hammered?

Meanwhile effective SEO guy has 15 sites still ranking and new ideas to rank and bank popping up and isn't wasting time talking to these moronic power-mad pricks

Would you rather make a few thousand a month for a year or two - or safely make fuck all forever!
Does that question deserve a fraction of a second to consider?

Go to it brothers. Play the game right. Take care, have fast feet, build in contingency and redundancy. Stay cost effective, plan for failure at some point. But above all remember. No matter how pious these WH evangelists are - their ineffective ranking techniques are almost as likely to get hammered as yours - and in the mean time you are coining it!

Google is the Wizard of Oz, always concerned about the stability and control of his kingdom. BHW is a good training ground for the future Black Hat warlocks to keep google in its toes and from becoming an undisputed monopoly. Just another venue for Guerilla warfare, who is the establishment, us or them?

 

[antichrist]

I have seen both sides of this table. 10 page site earning 5 figures a month, eventually hit (made a lot while it lasted). I also attempted to do the whitehat thing. 250k word website wiped off the planet, total made: 300 dollars.

Good post, I would rather chose to make money than waste my time any longer.

 

[blacat]

Please explain why were you wasting time at GWMF?

 

[west555]

So true, Right to the bone
Even those white guys are black they just don't realize it yet

 

[aposterioris]

So true, Right to the bone
Even those white guys are black they just don't realize it yet

More along the line of a superiority complex. White Hat needs to differientiat itself in order to be palpable to the masses . Along the lines that diamonds are a girls best friend. Sure, just like when Debeers buys most of the diamonds to maintain an artificial price.

 

[zebrahat]

Great read, and so true. Forget this black or white dogmatic thinking.

A good SEO should have a versatile skillset.

That means he should be able to go out and do some outreach to get some guest posts, then go build a high quality pbn, write an amazing press release, publish it, and then go fire up GSA and black hat that shit all the way to page 1.

If you're adhering too much to either side, white or black...IMO you are missing a huge chunk of the game.

why not go for the whole ball of wax.

be an ALL hat SEO.

I would say be 'zebra' hat, and disregard the whole white-hat/black-hat game, by mixing the disciplines freely, but intelligently. The more you do this, the more you'll find that the white hat problem is really just a Google problem (i.e., its bullying of the whole IM scene). 'If you don't play the game, they can't put you in the penalty box,' as the saying goes. If you ignore Google (70% of the search engine market) entirely, for example, and only do SEO for Bing/Yahoo (30% of the SE market), you'll get good SE traffic without the penalty hassles.

If more internet markers concentrated on optimizing their sites for this other 30% of search traffic, they would get about 42% of the traffic they could get from Google, but it would certainly be more steady, long term traffic, and not subject to the algo change per minute nonsense big G puts us through. This means getting away with the black hat methods (that B/Y won't penalize you for), plus supplementing with whatever non SEO tactics you can, is the future of search engine marketing going forward--i.e., a future without Google.

 

[ComputerEngineer]

i am totally agree with you

especially homo WMF admins

i really hate those homos almost all of them are homo

it is utterly nonsense to write post in wmf support forum

 

[Expertpeon]

I say let these people believe whatever they wish to believe. There's really no advantage in correcting their misconceptions. The more people that fall for the Google "white hat" arguments of no guest posts, no link schemes and nothing but "content" the better in my opinion.

Their ranks are growing much faster than the number of "blackhatters", and I think that's a good thing.

 

[Scritty]

Please explain why were you wasting time at GWMF?

I waste my time... so you don't have to

I'm really glad I don't know any GWMF people in real life. They make an issue of not being paid.
But they are certainly "paid in kind" trips to Google HQ and a nice shiny badge to stick on their websites which undoubtedly earns them extra hard cash.
So while Google doesn't pay them by handing over a cheque, they do directly facilitate them getting more money.

All that, 90% of them are total wankers. Nasty little jobsworths who spend the majority of their time taking the piss and ganging up on posters. Nasty little runts.

 

[Scritty]

I say let these people believe whatever they wish to believe. There's really no advantage in correcting their misconceptions. The more people that fall for the Google "white hat" arguments of no guest posts, no link schemes and nothing but "content" the better in my opinion.

Their ranks are growing much faster than the number of "blackhatters", and I think that's a good thing.

You mean ranks in the "number of them" sense not the "how high they are ranking" sense.

Yes I agree.
Thing is, by putting this out there I'm not saying anything that someone with a couple of years experience doesn't already know.
Google's biggest win with every update is not the SERP changes themselves, but the FEAR.

So I feel better putting this out. It's cleansing.
Most will not take any notice of this, not enough to change the balance of those moving over to make Fishkin and his like more money - and you are right, this means ranking effectively gets easier and easier as this side of the fence clears out.
Still, I had to say it - just a trip to GWMF on behalf of another webmaster looking to hire me made me that fucking mad I had to say something. I can't believe what a bunch of unhelpful self-righteous trolling pricks most of those mods are. Nasty little bastards. I left after reading what the guy hiring me had written, and decided not to add anything there, I was just too wound up to write anything constructive, that's when I came here and thought I'd share.

Scritty

 

[burglar]

Dammit Scritty, now you've got me thinking about getting back into SEO after a couple of years away. I was never an SEO superstar, that's for certain, but I was happy with the few pennies that came my way until it was killed off by one of G's black-and-white critters.

I've since moved into other areas of traffic generation and had some decent success with it, but reading this at this time has me reconsidering my next move. My main money site has actually been showing signs of life quite recently, and even a little revenue after being completely dead for two years. It's suppose it's likely due to the recent changes G has made which seemed to have dialed back some of the changes that wiped my site off the map.

Looks like it's time to start playing the SEO game again, but -- and this is the most important "but" for someone like me -- I won't be backing off on my other traffic-generation methods in favor of putting all my eggs in G's basket again. That's not a mistake I intend to ever make again.

Thanks, Scritty. Inspiring post as usual.

 

[SEO Power]

The last time I visited Google's webmaster help forum was 2 years ago. Why did I stop? Because of the same unhelpful and mannerless mods on there. From my observation back then, it seems they don't like talking about backlinks and off-site SEO. Whenever a webmaster presents a problem to them, all they do is offer some crappy on-page SEO advice.

 

[Liquidmetal]

Thanks for the post, i really love the tone of this posts, here or in your blog.

Anyway i have been always wondering why people even believe in the existence of such thing as white hat seo, since from the google perspective and from what they say, you simply CAN'T create links (manually, automated..). Not even attempt to persuade people to create links, basically any attempt to promote yourself online other than create hq content and wait until it spread by itself is evil.

There is no such thing as white hat seo.

 

[aposterioris]

I would say be 'zebra' hat, and disregard the whole white-hat/black-hat game, by mixing the disciplines freely, but intelligently. The more you do this, the more you'll find that the white hat problem is really just a Google problem (i.e., its bullying of the whole IM scene). 'If you don't play the game, they can't put you in the penalty box,' as the saying goes. If you ignore Google (70% of the search engine market) entirely, for example, and only do SEO for Bing/Yahoo (30% of the SE market), you'll get good SE traffic without the penalty hassles.

If more internet markers concentrated on optimizing their sites for this other 30% of search traffic, they would get about 42% of the traffic they could get from Google, but it would certainly be more steady, long term traffic, and not subject to the algo change per minute nonsense big G puts us through. This means getting away with the black hat methods (that B/Y won't penalize you for), plus supplementing with whatever non SEO tactics you can, is the future of search engine marketing going forward--i.e., a future without Google.

Excuse my ignorance, how we go about maximizing for Yahoo and Bing? I'm new to the game all all I heard has been G or G+