Basic questions

Hi,

I've gotten tired of reading the same seo-tips over and over (backlinks, 'content=king', and so on) so I registered here to learn more advanced techniques. I have some questions you might be able to help me with:

1. Is using the tier 1,2,3 tactic blackhat?
2. Why isn't giving your competition spammy links a thing? I realise its a shitty thing to do, but it could work to mess with their google position right?

Thanks in advance!

1. Actively building backlinks is "black hat", but that's the wrong way of thinking about it in my opinion. The whole black hat and white hat concepts are more like shades of grey, with safer techniques being closer to the white hat side and techniques that are clearly against the Google Webmaster Guidelines being closer to the black hat side. If I were you, I would just practise building backlinks on a test site or a parasite page to get an idea of what tactics are more likely to get you penalised.

2. Because negative SEO has been known to backfire and just increase their rankings. Besides that, the time spent diddling around with lowering your competitors' rankings could be better spent improving your own.

Thanks for the fast reply! is there an easy way to check if a website has been punished by Google? i know about the Moz spam score but that doesn't seem to be very accurate...

Hotpete said:

Thanks for the fast reply! is there an easy way to check if a website has been punished by Google? i know about the Moz spam score but that doesn't seem to be very accurate...

Click to expand...

If you want to find out if a domain has been manually penalised, you can add the site to your Google Search Console account and check for "Manual Actions".