BH vs WH (experiment)

I recently launched 2 very similar sites. Both are sort of niche social network type sites that get a lot decent amount of searches and are fairly competitive to rank for

Since I was launching the sites at pretty much the same time, I decided to do a split test type experiment

On one of the sites, I did some tons of backlinks, piad for traffic, loads of FB marketing (spam), diggs, likes, twitter marketting, directory submissions etc...

For the other site, I decided to keep it nice and clean. No backlinks, no BH at all.

They main keyword that both sites are trying to rank for is a two word keyword: [keyword1] [keyword2], which both are relevant to the niche

The BH site is [another word][keyword2].net and the WH site is [keyword1][keyword2]

So you can already see, the whitehat site has a slight advantage in terms of the domain name, but the backhat site will have the advantage of a shit loads of links. Both sites are custom developments, have great on page SEO (great urls, keyword rich, meta keys/descriptions for every page)

For the BH site:

• I bought 20k backlinks and blasted straight to the home page with 80% [keyword1][keyword2], 10% [keyword1], 10% [keyword2]
  
• Bought 200 diggs
  
• Posted at least 50 facebook links a day
  
• Bought 10k "fake" visits
  
• Posted on twitter at least once a day
  
• Posted to every directory I could find
  
• Posted about 50 "high quality" links
  
• A few other top secret tricks to get loads of traffic

For the WH site, I didn't do anything even slightly blackhat. I just wrote a few proper, relevant keyword rich articles (I have 12 in total now) and let the site index naturally.

It has now been about 3 months and here are the results:

The BH site:

• #6 on page 1 for [keyword1][keyword2]
• #8 on page 1 for [keyword1] (this is a highly competitive keyword by the way)
• gets traffic from about 300 other search terms
• has had about 160k impressions
• 30k unique visits
• 14k signups
• 43% bounce rate
• about 300 visits per day now

The WH site:

• #2 on page 1 for [keyword1][keyword2] (due to the domain more than anything)
• ranks well for the article keywords + about 300 other search terms
• 100k pageviews
• 9k unique visits
• 1.5k signups
• 37% bounce
• about 150 visits per day

So what have we learned? BH wins all the way.
9k visits vs 30k visits. 1.5k signups vs 14k signups
I will update this thread in a few months to let everyone know how it is going, but at the moment the clear winner in blackhat

Good post, interesting to see the differences. Will also be interesting to see how it pans out (from my White hat experience I'd say that will improve steadily as time goes on, I don't know how bh performs over longer periods?), keep it updated!

did you really have a doubt about what is going to win when setting up the test? ...

I personally believe in a mixture of white hat and black hat. Diversity can never hurt.

Cool stuff bro. BHW all the way.

Only thing to add;

beware of the scenario:
Site lifespan:

a) BH - 2 months
b) WH - 10 years

Other than that, extremely good experiment. I always like experiments, and this was cool one to check out. Looking forward to hear more in future.

This is a fantastic experiment. It shows how for rankings its white hat all the way. So for local seo, stick to white hat. Otherwise, black hat all the way!

Interesting to see the differences. Great post!

Thanks for the positive responses.
I don't want to turn this thread into one of those "live" experiment type threads, but I will update it in a couple of months (sooner if something major happens) to let everyone know how its getting on

feel free to ask any questions

What was the age of the domain names by the way?

Really good experiment.BH FTW!

Really nice experiment.
Interesting results.
I would like it if you do an update in another 3 months
/Izerman

I think it's also interesting to see how far an EMD takes you.

I think that the real take-away from this is that EMD + BHSEO is the way to go

amazingRay said:

What was the age of the domain names by the way?

Click to expand...

Both domains were about 1 month old when the sites went live. Both registered on the same day, neither had even been registered before I got them

Wow! Thanks for doing this experiment!
Now will i always do BH

+ for u

Thanks for sharing the results with us. I personally think that there is no such thing as white hat link building. If you're building links yourself, your balckhatting as, according to G, links to your sites should be build by others that like your content.

However, the quality of the links matter, and the place where these links come from matter even more. In your regular, spammed to death, blog post, links to your sites will be next to words such as Viagra, porn and so on. Not a place I would like to spam links to my money site as the crawler might associate your site with those nasty keywords.

My 2 cents.

Keep doing what you do, and keep us posted. I'm curious to see how it turns out in the long run.

funkman said:

Only thing to add;

beware of the scenario:
Site lifespan:

a) BH - 2 months
b) WH - 10 years

Other than that, extremely good experiment. I always like experiments, and this was cool one to check out. Looking forward to hear more in future.

Click to expand...

Says who?

BHopkins said:

Says who?

Click to expand...

and yet the BH site is already 3 months old...

pf69.com said:

and yet the BH site is already 3 months old...

Click to expand...

i guess it depends on how blackhat you go. i haven't done anything to hectic, so the lifespan of this BH site should be far longer

Thought I might as well give an update on this, been quite a while:

The BH site:

• #4 on page 1 for [keyword1][keyword2]
• #4 on page 1 for [keyword1] (this is a highly competitive keyword by the way)
• gets traffic from about 1350 other search terms
• has had about 400k impressions
• 100k unique visits
• 31k signups
• 47% bounce rate
• still about 300 visits per day

The WH site:

• #1 on page 1 for [keyword1][keyword2] (due to the domain more than anything)
• ranks well for the article keywords + about 2500 other search terms
• 1.6 million pageviews
• 9k unique visits
• 35k signups
• 32% bounce
• about 2500 visits per day

Together the sites make me about $50 a day

This will be the last update I giveo on these sites, because I think the point is pretty obvious here:
If you want to grow quickly, go blackhat. But unless you maintain the methods and continue building, whitehat will take you in the end
If you looking long term, go whitehat. You stand virtually no chance of being penalised, and while it is a lot more work at the begining, it will pay off in the end