Albert Camus
Junior Member
- Mar 29, 2020
- 155
- 132
Disclaimer: This isn't related to the well-known studio!
The keyword itself doesn't seem to be of high difficulty. Checking the serps; Digital playground comes first, then a bunch of adult websites, wikipedia appears in the middle of the first page. Most of the first page results have no backlinks at all.
Publishing this here on a pretty strong domain with a good profile may help alot. Blackhatworld is a real Digital Playground for many of us, the content is completely relevant to the website here!
Can I really get to the first page with this?!
I'd give it a try, cuz why not?! I mean that I'll be building links to this page with 'digital playground' as an anchor, maybe I'll even be buying a sh*t load of Social Signals and a couple of reddit first page links! (If only I've the budget
)
Can I rank my own Digital Playground?
Do I have any chance to outrank the brand itself?!
Short answer: No! In most cases you won't be able to outrank a brand for its name.
But we still have many other places on the first page we can shoot for! Is that achievable at all?!
Another thing that 'might' help is a google feature;
In many cases this feature comes activated by default and is also active on most of the parentally-controlled devices. According to Statista, there are about 2 billion minors in the world. A rough estimate would leave us with few hundred millions of parentally-controlled devices!
Having a look at Google play search results for 'parental control'; the few first applications have a total sum of 100m+ downloads!
I'm dead sure there's a method to utilize this and benefit from, but have no serious idea in mind rnw..
Back to our playground; Now the adult results are filtered, the competition is much easier!
At the first position now, there's a university press site with the content about a completely different subject;
An important factor to always consider is relevancy. Digital Playground is a known brand to the point google would mostly assume you want the adult movie studio and will rank them for that keyword.
Although I'm using the same word, what I mean is completely different and it's not the adult entertainment pioneers. By using the term 'Digital Playground' my intention is the following exclusively;
But do Google bots really understand relevancy and intent? The answer to this one should be a percentage not a yes or no.
Try searching for 'windows' or 'apple', you'll find no results related to an actual window or an apple, try searching for 'mango', you'll find both the company and the fruit!
If you're searching for 'travelers', you'll find a tv series, an insurance company and nothing about travelling.
If you're building a website about mushroom growing, you may have a page that's talking about plant diseases and how to deal with infected mushrooms.
Hence 'Infected Mushroom' is a music band. Think about how would google rank websites for that keyword and is your page related to the keyword in the eyes of Google?
Search algorithms seems to have their own way determining context, relevancy and intent. I can give you hundreds of missed-up examples in search results.
Too much inconsistency regarding the way google understands the search intent, let's take another example;
This also shows how important is the usage of related keywords, long tails and keyword variations along with building a completely relevant website. We the humans do use those search terms way more than we might use a one word, use this for your own favor.
So, Will Google bots pick this web page and rank it for the keyword ''Digital Playground' if I'm putting the needed effort? Honestly, I still have no idea...
One last important factor that I didn't mention yet is the CTR and bounce rate!
A dude searching for an adult entertainment won't stay at this page for a single second. Mostly, this page will have a very low CTR.
Even if it appears on first page of Google, that would never last and the ranking would dip in no time because of the low CTR and the high bounce rate.
This is the first reason why you might fail
This video follows some market researches and various cases that shows how you could easily be mislead even when all the data and numbers you gathered are right.The video isn't directly IM related but is full of great info and helpful insights.
Marketing isn't an exact science. There is always a great chance to run into fallacies, biased or misleading data. Always question what you got, reason and evaluate things on a human logic scale.
DON'T ever rely solely on information, stats and insights. Use logical thinking, human intuition and common sense.
Let's discuss a practical example;
I decided to start affiliate marketing with plans in mind to launch my own product under same niche later on (If it's working out fine ofc!). I'm not decided yet on what kind of product or what niche I'd be tackling.
The first thing that comes to my mind is to check Google trends for some 'hot prospects'.
This is a section from the 'year in search' report, let's break this down;
Always break things down to it's foundation. Have a good look at the bigger picture and never forget to look deep from every possible angle.
I'll say it again 'DON'T ever rely solely on information, metrics, stats and insights. Use logical thinking, human intuition and common sense.'
If I've done that I'd have realized that cleaning products is declining in popularity since the pandemic is 'kinda' easing. I'd have also realized that jackets are only suitable in winter, and the sales would be higher on colder countries. That makes sense!
Try to come up with the most captivating titles and headlines, clear taglines, memorable slogans and the best possible copy of your ad/article/etc..
If your marketing copy doesn't 'click' with the average person, your products will have no clicks too. Same would apply if there's no need for your products/services.
No matter how perfect is your work for google bots, it still needs to be mainly presented for humans, keep that always in mind.
I'm not saying that content is the only king and there's no need to optimize things, build links and any other related SEO/marketing method.
Both humans and bots should be put into consideration. Try to find the perfect balance when creating your content. Keep the bots and crawlers in mind but not over optimizing to the point of making it non-human-friendly.
Let's have a look at a perfect example of what a successful page would be like;
Google is my playground. I make hundreds of daily searches and since you're into internet marketing, bet it's the same case for you too! (if not, start building the habit of googling each and everything, it always comes handy)
This time I picked the search term 'how to learn', here's what I got;
This is what a good page may be like. Providing real value, directing mainly for humans (prospected customers) and also following the best SEO practices; all essential.
You can't just rank a bad quality/spammy webpage and expect it to stand for long. It may happen with good on-page SEO and aggressive link building. You can still profit, but this won't lead to passive income source or a stable profitable business.
This is what's called 'churn and burn' which is a well known blackhat method.
I agree with him. Being a blackhat isn't just a technical term related to hacking or marketing, it's an ideology. It's not about having the technical ability, it's about the mindset, the mentality, the motives, the ethics among many other personality traits.
Blackhat is looking mainly for the quick profits, mostly following hit and run patterns. Most of the efforts will go towards exploiting the system, abusing the possible resources.
On the other hand, whitehats have a completely different mindset. They're looking forward to provide something of real value to build a career, a business or anyother form of passive high income. Most of the whitehats efforts will go towards utilizing the system in the best possible way to generate profit.
For a complete novice searching for a way to make some extra money online, such a debate would be too confusing and misleading. Anyway, I'm not entering this debate.
The debate around which ways are really working is a real long old one. But in fact, both ways might work, in certain ways and for different purposes. It's a matter of one's own choice which way to go
13 years ago; Windows 7 is just out!
Time to work...
Logging into my windows vps, starting a certain application, waiting for it to load, connected to server, waiting for the incoming connections, loading data, still loading, too much loading.. The vps is now down because of the volume of incoming connections!
This sounds like a complete mess, but let me sort things out...
My main niche was online gaming, a certain couple of games. I didn't have a website or any kind of blog when starting, had no capital and nothing to lose!
Forums was a big thing back then. I joined every forum I could found that's related to my games of choice under the same username, started posting comments and warm up the forum accounts.
Later I started posting game guides, informative and full of in-game images and videos (256p video that only QuickTime player can open!), I also started giving discounts and giveaways for in-game items trading in the related market places. I started gaining some good reputation and popularity among those gamers!
Now to the monetization part, game bots! I was posting links to free game bots and helper tools which would pay me pretty well for every install!
After a little while, I made a website with the same previously published content and would also be monetized with the same game bots.
That was working great and paying me more than what I expected. It was going great but I wasn't completely satisfied. So, I decided to scale...
This method comes at 0 cost, have high earning potential and seems to be completely spam/scam free and whitehat! Am I misleading you now?!
Let's get back to how I scaled this;
I started implementing the exact same method with a couple more niches, copying every step I did earlier to the point of having high reputation and a good website covering this niche. I made a total of 5 websites!
I had a day job at the time, I was working at an internet cafe (expected, right?!) managing 25 pcs. With the given benefit, I *hired* 2 of my friends as assistants, and gave them a simple task; to spam my websites' links everywhere possible on the internet for 10 hours daily!
I got to that point I was becoming sort of a little authority in those micro-niches! I was able to upload the bots and tools to the most popular torrent sites and even some private trackers!
My offering was cracked tools and free bots! For the games I started with, I was cracking a paid bot myself. For the later work in other niches, it was a JV with someone who knew how to crack any software back then.
I've gone more hardcore on spamming, a couple more people joined the spam party! My own accounts are still reputable and spam-free while the others do every possible way of spamming; from commenting and upvoting my posts, to spam my links everywhere possible, even to reuploading and republishing my content and files..
Now this method is turning to be pure spam done in a smart way!
I had no idea of SEO being a thing. I was just doing my thing and also searching for guides and tutorials for my main method. Spam was working great, so I decided to go all in!
All I was looking for when I started was some quick profits and no more. Later on, I knew the potentials of the method so I started the scaling process only for more short term profits. This was not built as a long term passive funnel.
Anyway, I think this was a good method and was working great back then. This won't work today at all just because of the spam detection being harder. You can still take the inspiration and build on it a working system that's suitable for today.
But still there's a catch...
With me not telling you more details about the monetization method, you may easily be misled to a wrong route, so I'll be telling...
The game bots and all the downloadables I was sharing contained a hidden trojan that is encrypted from each and every antivirus software!
At the beginning I was capturing game accounts data, later on I started capturing credit cards!
That's what I would call a real blackhat campaign!
Also, that's all for now.. sadly!
Disclaimer: I'm not promoting or encouraging such behaviors or any form of hacking or illegal activities.
Something random to start with
Any chance for this page to be ranking for the keyword 'Digital Playground'?! Well, I honestly have no idea!The keyword itself doesn't seem to be of high difficulty. Checking the serps; Digital playground comes first, then a bunch of adult websites, wikipedia appears in the middle of the first page. Most of the first page results have no backlinks at all.
Publishing this here on a pretty strong domain with a good profile may help alot. Blackhatworld is a real Digital Playground for many of us, the content is completely relevant to the website here!
Can I really get to the first page with this?!
I'd give it a try, cuz why not?! I mean that I'll be building links to this page with 'digital playground' as an anchor, maybe I'll even be buying a sh*t load of Social Signals and a couple of reddit first page links! (If only I've the budget
)Can I rank my own Digital Playground?
Do I have any chance to outrank the brand itself?!
Short answer: No! In most cases you won't be able to outrank a brand for its name.
But we still have many other places on the first page we can shoot for! Is that achievable at all?!
Another thing that 'might' help is a google feature;
In many cases this feature comes activated by default and is also active on most of the parentally-controlled devices. According to Statista, there are about 2 billion minors in the world. A rough estimate would leave us with few hundred millions of parentally-controlled devices!
Having a look at Google play search results for 'parental control'; the few first applications have a total sum of 100m+ downloads!
I'm dead sure there's a method to utilize this and benefit from, but have no serious idea in mind rnw..
Back to our playground; Now the adult results are filtered, the competition is much easier!
At the first position now, there's a university press site with the content about a completely different subject;
Well, academic press in such topics isn't something I'm interested about, but at least we're finally finding a tech-related thing under that keyword!
An important factor to always consider is relevancy. Digital Playground is a known brand to the point google would mostly assume you want the adult movie studio and will rank them for that keyword.
Although I'm using the same word, what I mean is completely different and it's not the adult entertainment pioneers. By using the term 'Digital Playground' my intention is the following exclusively;
Source: Urban Dictionary
Well, now I'm being clear enough I think.
But do Google bots really understand relevancy and intent? The answer to this one should be a percentage not a yes or no.
Try searching for 'windows' or 'apple', you'll find no results related to an actual window or an apple, try searching for 'mango', you'll find both the company and the fruit!
If you're searching for 'travelers', you'll find a tv series, an insurance company and nothing about travelling.
If you're building a website about mushroom growing, you may have a page that's talking about plant diseases and how to deal with infected mushrooms.
Hence 'Infected Mushroom' is a music band. Think about how would google rank websites for that keyword and is your page related to the keyword in the eyes of Google?
Search algorithms seems to have their own way determining context, relevancy and intent. I can give you hundreds of missed-up examples in search results.
Too much inconsistency regarding the way google understands the search intent, let's take another example;
- Tesla : All top serps are about the company and no mentions of Nikola Tesla.
- Walt Disney : First result is a wiki page about the man himself, the rest are mixed.
- J.P. Morgan : Same as Disney.
- Most of the companies/organizations named after people will be ranking higher on web search than the persons themselves. (The power of branding)
- Trump : Not a single line about any of his own entities. The man himself is a much stronger brand than any of his companies.
This also shows how important is the usage of related keywords, long tails and keyword variations along with building a completely relevant website. We the humans do use those search terms way more than we might use a one word, use this for your own favor.
So, Will Google bots pick this web page and rank it for the keyword ''Digital Playground' if I'm putting the needed effort? Honestly, I still have no idea...
One last important factor that I didn't mention yet is the CTR and bounce rate!
A dude searching for an adult entertainment won't stay at this page for a single second. Mostly, this page will have a very low CTR.
Even if it appears on first page of Google, that would never last and the ranking would dip in no time because of the low CTR and the high bounce rate.
This is the first reason why you might fail
Being mislead
Even plain numbers can be misleading sometimes!This video follows some market researches and various cases that shows how you could easily be mislead even when all the data and numbers you gathered are right.The video isn't directly IM related but is full of great info and helpful insights.
Marketing isn't an exact science. There is always a great chance to run into fallacies, biased or misleading data. Always question what you got, reason and evaluate things on a human logic scale.
DON'T ever rely solely on information, stats and insights. Use logical thinking, human intuition and common sense.
Let's discuss a practical example;
I decided to start affiliate marketing with plans in mind to launch my own product under same niche later on (If it's working out fine ofc!). I'm not decided yet on what kind of product or what niche I'd be tackling.
The first thing that comes to my mind is to check Google trends for some 'hot prospects'.
This is a section from the 'year in search' report, let's break this down;
- 'Hand soap' comes first. Also, the more general term 'Cleaning products' comes at the 5th place!
- Now I know what's the most trendy and rising in popularity category, time to start working on that?
- Starting an affiliate website for cleaning products and focusing on hand soaps sounds like a good idea.
- It's easy to find products to market within this niche. Also, there're various brands and product types that I can cover and write about (reviews/informational/etc..).
- At first glance, this seems to be a good prospect but in fact it's not the best bet. Don't let the information mislead you..
- Let's dig a bit deeper;
- Looking at the graph, the interest rates are drastically dropping to around 50%. This category is clearly losing the momentum.
- Having a look at the world map, the most interested countries are Indonesia, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia!
- Affiliate commission or display ads rates for those countries are too low. It's clear I won't be earning good with that.
- Even building a website to sell later won't work fine. Most of the traffic you'll get would be from t2 and t3 countries, not too valuable.
- I'm not saying this is a bad niche or advising anybody to stay away, I'm just thinking and reasoning.
- 'Leather jacket' at the second place. This sounds more lucrative than soap!
- Let's follow the same process again..
- This looks a lot better with the trend line going up!
- Also, UK coming first, USA, Australia and Canada among the top 10; this indicates that mostly I'll have t1 good quality traffic!
- But once again, this is completely misleading; This type of product is a SEASONAL one. It's completely natural and logical for this term to rise in popularity in November and December.
- You can still go ahead and pick this one but now you know one thing to expect; Most of the searches/sales will be coming only during early winter.
- Let's follow the same process again..
Always break things down to it's foundation. Have a good look at the bigger picture and never forget to look deep from every possible angle.
I'll say it again 'DON'T ever rely solely on information, metrics, stats and insights. Use logical thinking, human intuition and common sense.'
If I've done that I'd have realized that cleaning products is declining in popularity since the pandemic is 'kinda' easing. I'd have also realized that jackets are only suitable in winter, and the sales would be higher on colder countries. That makes sense!
We should be marketing for humans not for bots!
Whatever you're working on, as long as your customers are meant to be of the human kind, you should be concerned about humans interacting with your campaign more than the crawlers, bots or anything else.Try to come up with the most captivating titles and headlines, clear taglines, memorable slogans and the best possible copy of your ad/article/etc..
If your marketing copy doesn't 'click' with the average person, your products will have no clicks too. Same would apply if there's no need for your products/services.
No matter how perfect is your work for google bots, it still needs to be mainly presented for humans, keep that always in mind.
I'm not saying that content is the only king and there's no need to optimize things, build links and any other related SEO/marketing method.
Both humans and bots should be put into consideration. Try to find the perfect balance when creating your content. Keep the bots and crawlers in mind but not over optimizing to the point of making it non-human-friendly.
Let's have a look at a perfect example of what a successful page would be like;
Google is my playground. I make hundreds of daily searches and since you're into internet marketing, bet it's the same case for you too! (if not, start building the habit of googling each and everything, it always comes handy)
This time I picked the search term 'how to learn', here's what I got;
- The first result is an informational articlefrom a high authority website
- The domain profile and metrics are too strong, high DA, 1m+ backlinks with zero spam.
- The content is purely informational, perfectly written and well SEOd.
- Article consists of a well researched 10 bullet points with good text for each of them. The content flow from each point to the later is natural and organized properly. (This's one reason this website has an average visit duration of 10 minutes!)
- Internal linking and outbound links are both present.
- There's good usage of stock images (with the source being mentioned). All images are completely related and having the proper tags/descriptions/alt-texts.
- At the end of the article you'll find sources, citations and a good list of additional readings.
- The page is relevant to the website's main niche, having proper tags, category, meta description, etc..
- The headline and taglines are on spot!
- The second result is a free coursefrom Coursera with 3m+ enrolled students!
- With Coursera being one of the top e-learning platforms this isn't surprising at all.
- The page has all the needed info about the course, its syllabus, the instructor, students reviews, enrollment option and a call of action for free enrollment.
- The page literally provides everything a person needs to know about the course and is also keyword rich and well SEOd.
- Also, the course's title;
This is what a good page may be like. Providing real value, directing mainly for humans (prospected customers) and also following the best SEO practices; all essential.
You can't just rank a bad quality/spammy webpage and expect it to stand for long. It may happen with good on-page SEO and aggressive link building. You can still profit, but this won't lead to passive income source or a stable profitable business.
This is what's called 'churn and burn' which is a well known blackhat method.
The older than the internet whitehat vs blackhat debate
Albus Dumbledore
I agree with him. Being a blackhat isn't just a technical term related to hacking or marketing, it's an ideology. It's not about having the technical ability, it's about the mindset, the mentality, the motives, the ethics among many other personality traits.
Blackhat is looking mainly for the quick profits, mostly following hit and run patterns. Most of the efforts will go towards exploiting the system, abusing the possible resources.
On the other hand, whitehats have a completely different mindset. They're looking forward to provide something of real value to build a career, a business or anyother form of passive high income. Most of the whitehats efforts will go towards utilizing the system in the best possible way to generate profit.
For a complete novice searching for a way to make some extra money online, such a debate would be too confusing and misleading. Anyway, I'm not entering this debate.
The debate around which ways are really working is a real long old one. But in fact, both ways might work, in certain ways and for different purposes. It's a matter of one's own choice which way to go
An old journey of mine
Let me go through some of my own memories and tell you about one of the methods that really worked great with me13 years ago; Windows 7 is just out!
Time to work...
Logging into my windows vps, starting a certain application, waiting for it to load, connected to server, waiting for the incoming connections, loading data, still loading, too much loading.. The vps is now down because of the volume of incoming connections!
This sounds like a complete mess, but let me sort things out...
My main niche was online gaming, a certain couple of games. I didn't have a website or any kind of blog when starting, had no capital and nothing to lose!
Forums was a big thing back then. I joined every forum I could found that's related to my games of choice under the same username, started posting comments and warm up the forum accounts.
Later I started posting game guides, informative and full of in-game images and videos (256p video that only QuickTime player can open!), I also started giving discounts and giveaways for in-game items trading in the related market places. I started gaining some good reputation and popularity among those gamers!
Now to the monetization part, game bots! I was posting links to free game bots and helper tools which would pay me pretty well for every install!
After a little while, I made a website with the same previously published content and would also be monetized with the same game bots.
That was working great and paying me more than what I expected. It was going great but I wasn't completely satisfied. So, I decided to scale...
This method comes at 0 cost, have high earning potential and seems to be completely spam/scam free and whitehat! Am I misleading you now?!
Let's get back to how I scaled this;
I started implementing the exact same method with a couple more niches, copying every step I did earlier to the point of having high reputation and a good website covering this niche. I made a total of 5 websites!
I had a day job at the time, I was working at an internet cafe (expected, right?!) managing 25 pcs. With the given benefit, I *hired* 2 of my friends as assistants, and gave them a simple task; to spam my websites' links everywhere possible on the internet for 10 hours daily!
I got to that point I was becoming sort of a little authority in those micro-niches! I was able to upload the bots and tools to the most popular torrent sites and even some private trackers!
My offering was cracked tools and free bots! For the games I started with, I was cracking a paid bot myself. For the later work in other niches, it was a JV with someone who knew how to crack any software back then.
I've gone more hardcore on spamming, a couple more people joined the spam party! My own accounts are still reputable and spam-free while the others do every possible way of spamming; from commenting and upvoting my posts, to spam my links everywhere possible, even to reuploading and republishing my content and files..
Now this method is turning to be pure spam done in a smart way!
I had no idea of SEO being a thing. I was just doing my thing and also searching for guides and tutorials for my main method. Spam was working great, so I decided to go all in!
All I was looking for when I started was some quick profits and no more. Later on, I knew the potentials of the method so I started the scaling process only for more short term profits. This was not built as a long term passive funnel.
Anyway, I think this was a good method and was working great back then. This won't work today at all just because of the spam detection being harder. You can still take the inspiration and build on it a working system that's suitable for today.
But still there's a catch...
With me not telling you more details about the monetization method, you may easily be misled to a wrong route, so I'll be telling...
The game bots and all the downloadables I was sharing contained a hidden trojan that is encrypted from each and every antivirus software!
At the beginning I was capturing game accounts data, later on I started capturing credit cards!
That's what I would call a real blackhat campaign!
Also, that's all for now.. sadly!
Disclaimer: I'm not promoting or encouraging such behaviors or any form of hacking or illegal activities.
Notes;
- I'm a bit confused about which sub forum is the most relevant to this thread, Please do what's necessary.
- This is just the starting of a series of related articles I'll be publishing soon if the forum is finding this useful.
- I didn't outline this article when I started writing. This is more of a free discussion, excuse me for the mess...
- Also I didn't make any audit, grammar or Spell checkups so I beg your pardon for the surely present errors...
- Would you mind rating the writing quality of this article? With proper SEO and being more focused on certain topic/kw's, can I rank with content of the same quality level?
- Finally, any chance of this article ranking for 'Digital playground'?!