Is black hat SEO bad for legit website?

I'm trying to succeed with a startup project. It's a medical related company and in the blog there are several well written and researched professional medical articles. After 2 years I'm starting to see some traffic, but for most topics there's too much competition from authority websites to rank high on google.

I was thinking about trying to give a boost to a couple of keywords by buying a black hat SEO package here on the forum and see what's the return in terms of traffic.

I'm worried about the downsides of using such services since this is not a disposable domain or temporary venture to make quick money and then move on, it is supposed to last indefinitely, have high reputation, etc.

I read a lot of reviews about the service I might buy and they are all positive with good consistent results. I can't ask the seller his thoughts on this as of course he is biased. So since here there are several people more experienced than me, I'd like to ask what is your opinion on this.

Thanks

Launch a new disposable domain, try seo services on that domain.

Don’t do full black hat mix it up

Rick88 said:

I'm trying to succeed with a startup project. It's a medical related company and in the blog there are several well written and researched professional medical articles. After 2 years I'm starting to see some traffic, but for most topics there's too much competition from authority websites to rank high on google.

I was thinking about trying to give a boost to a couple of keywords by buying a black hat SEO package here on the forum and see what's the return in terms of traffic.

I'm worried about the downsides of using such services since this is not a disposable domain or temporary venture to make quick money and then move on, it is supposed to last indefinitely, have high reputation, etc.

I read a lot of reviews about the service I might buy and they are all positive with good consistent results. I can't ask the seller his thoughts on this as of course he is biased. So since here there are several people more experienced than me, I'd like to ask what is your opinion on this.

Thanks

Click to expand...

Can always go with one of the safer approaches and get guest post backlinks. They usually write relevant information to the link/post your pointing it too and doesn't look suspicious to Google at all.

Just make sure you get good Guest Post sites and not spammy ones. Make sure they write the guest post in a medical-related site.

@Rick88 - you creating few web 2.0 and pointing links to your money site is considered blackhat, but it will not hurt you. Buying links is also considered blackhat, and some of them will hurt you, specially if you get them cheap ones.

so you cannot say, that you will not do blackhat seo on your business site. You have to. You just doing press releases with your desired anchor keywords as backlinks is blackhat, but it is an absolute necessary for business site.

so be smart about it. for a business website, don't use any automation backlink tool like gsa or scrapebox in your tiers.

follow the best practices. if you have questions, feel free to ask.

Rick88 said:

I'm trying to succeed with a startup project. It's a medical related company and in the blog there are several well written and researched professional medical articles. After 2 years I'm starting to see some traffic, but for most topics there's too much competition from authority websites to rank high on google.

I was thinking about trying to give a boost to a couple of keywords by buying a black hat SEO package here on the forum and see what's the return in terms of traffic.

I'm worried about the downsides of using such services since this is not a disposable domain or temporary venture to make quick money and then move on, it is supposed to last indefinitely, have high reputation, etc.

I read a lot of reviews about the service I might buy and they are all positive with good consistent results. I can't ask the seller his thoughts on this as of course he is biased. So since here there are several people more experienced than me, I'd like to ask what is your opinion on this.

Thanks

Click to expand...

Does the startup depend on visitors from search for its revenue?

You have to go for mostly safe links, don't go for link that's anything related to being funny.

If ypur startup is primarily focused targeted at a country, what you should do is buy some guestposts/sponsored posts from news websites in that country, or other sites that cover what your startup does, example is tech sites for tech startups.
Ensure that the news websites abd techsites are known or are generating good search traffic themselves.

About the service on BHW, don't go for PBNs maybe do a few guest posts from here, make sure they're not from PBNs or former PBNs.
Let the above links be as natural as they can be.

I'd suggest don't do any other type of link at all.

You can try with high quality authority sites and niche relevant sites with premium content related to your site. Make sure there is quality in all aspects.

You have to be extremely careful if you don't want to mess things up,
Especially if you don't have that experience with links, which one to buy and how to organize them.

If you have enough budget, hire someone that can help you up with this, but you will have to put all the energy on selecting this person as he will mess things up or make good work, so be careful and take it slowly, being sure.

@Rick88 ,

I would advise you to first look into your website and fix outstanding issues.

2 years is a longtime and enough time to build upon content relevancy and domain authority. Since you mention about having several well written and researched professional medical articles , I guess you should do proper internal link building and have a better SILO structure.

I would strong suggest you to stay away from SPAM backlinks or MASS backlinks. Focus on only quality backlinks like real link outreach, niche edits, but again with relevancy in them. Focus on relevancy and having a better link profile than your competitors and that should move the needle.

Best Regards.

Rick88 said:

I'm trying to succeed with a startup project. It's a medical related company and in the blog there are several well written and researched professional medical articles. After 2 years I'm starting to see some traffic, but for most topics there's too much competition from authority websites to rank high on google.

I was thinking about trying to give a boost to a couple of keywords by buying a black hat SEO package here on the forum and see what's the return in terms of traffic.

I'm worried about the downsides of using such services since this is not a disposable domain or temporary venture to make quick money and then move on, it is supposed to last indefinitely, have high reputation, etc.

I read a lot of reviews about the service I might buy and they are all positive with good consistent results. I can't ask the seller his thoughts on this as of course he is biased. So since here there are several people more experienced than me, I'd like to ask what is your opinion on this.

Thanks

Click to expand...

HenryObi said:

Does the startup depend on visitors from search for its revenue?

You have to go for mostly safe links, don't go for link that's anything related to being funny.

If ypur startup is primarily focused targeted at a country, what you should do is buy some guestposts/sponsored posts from news websites in that country, or other sites that cover what your startup does, example is tech sites for tech startups.
Ensure that the news websites abd techsites are known or are generating good search traffic themselves.

About the service on BHW, don't go for PBNs maybe do a few guest posts from here, make sure they're not from PBNs or former PBNs.
Let the above links be as natural as they can be.

I'd suggest don't do any other type of link at all.

Click to expand...

I'm in pre-seed stage, I have no revenue yet. Which is the whole big issue. 2 people doing tons of work in all imaginable fields with budget constraints. Many good options I thought about already are unfortunately out at the moment, will be able to afford them later on hopefully.
In the future the revenue will depend on visitors from search and for now I want to increase the number of visitors to have more leverage when pitching to investors or sponsors. The target is a worldwide audience (I translate the articles in up to 10 languages, although for now I'm focusing on English and Italian mainly). While in Italian I'm having good results without anyone's help especially in niche topics (top3 on google), in English it is extremely hard to rank well with medical articles as I have to compete with giant websites (even the rarest disease or procedure has been covered already by wiki, medscape, mayoclinic, and many more ...)
I already have spent some time doing SEO and link-building myself, but backlinks are mainly no-follow (some on Wikipedia, many on Quora, few from other sources).
I guess guest blog posts on niche relevant websites with do-follow links is the way to go at this point, and later with more money available sponsored posts on news and relevant websites. I'll stay away from the SEO packages here...
Although on-page seo may surely be improved too, I don't think that alone is going to help me to rank on 1st-2nd page in English and boost the visitors..

Thank you all for the clarification, the advice seems to be a consistent "don't buy it"

Rick88 said:

I guess guest blog posts on niche relevant websites with do-follow links is the way to go at this point

Click to expand...

Yeah! really good method to start up link building.

I think medical niche is very competitive and Google favors authority domains.

Your best bet is to get high quality guest posts from related domains.

As it is a startup, you can also do quality press release.

Also try to get coverage in startup related websites.

Are the articles focused around your product or start up?

Do you have a product or application in place that can be used / tested? Even if it's at early stages?

Id forget about the buying of links and focus on out reach get the people who you want using your product to have a look at prototypes (test if its software based or app) and give feedback ask them to document it and where possible share online.

Build up content around feedback and reports and link to the people who used / tested on Linkedin so you can start to build up some authority on your product / brand / site within that niche and or industry. You can even tag these people on social media when you post it giving your product further out reach.

IF at all possible I would try and get some medial research done with your product and see if you can get any white papers done and or then share them online. Tag and mention medical journals and see if they want to pick up the product to have a go or at least mention you in a retweet / repost.

Ontop of that you want to start connecting with like minded or professionals in your industry write up some posts and share them on Linkedin and again post on social media get all of your social accounts pointing to the site and the site to the social profiles THE same with all the post authors - you want to spend this time building up as much authority for "google" as possible right now.

The longer you have this history to fall back on the better it will help in later updates.

Not to mention doing the above WHEN you come to trying to source funding (I think you said in a post above) you already have medical expert feedback (if that's a thing for your product / service) to fall back on which gives you more weight again.

IF and when you do secure funding or the product moves to the next stage spend money on news posts on relevant and indirect sites stating phase 2 of development has started, funding raised or what ever it will be!

You want to build solid foundation first before you start to cut a few corners later.


As for trying to compete and create posts now for traffic. I don't know what you are offering or providing but id use answer the public to start to find some topics and then research out from there.

Use keyword, find topic, search in topic in google (are there any answers that are not relevant to the search?) IF so create content.

> search in topic in google

look for any broader subjects that can fall back or any indirect cases, brands or products OR topics that have limited information that can be used to focus and grow your content into a indirect market / category

Rick88 said:

I'm in pre-seed stage, I have no revenue yet. Which is the whole big issue. 2 people doing tons of work in all imaginable fields with budget constraints. Many good options I thought about already are unfortunately out at the moment, will be able to afford them later on hopefully.
In the future the revenue will depend on visitors from search and for now I want to increase the number of visitors to have more leverage when pitching to investors or sponsors. The target is a worldwide audience (I translate the articles in up to 10 languages, although for now I'm focusing on English and Italian mainly). While in Italian I'm having good results without anyone's help especially in niche topics (top3 on google), in English it is extremely hard to rank well with medical articles as I have to compete with giant websites (even the rarest disease or procedure has been covered already by wiki, medscape, mayoclinic, and many more ...)
I already have spent some time doing SEO and link-building myself, but backlinks are mainly no-follow (some on Wikipedia, many on Quora, few from other sources).
I guess guest blog posts on niche relevant websites with do-follow links is the way to go at this point, and later with more money available sponsored posts on news and relevant websites. I'll stay away from the SEO packages here...
Although on-page seo may surely be improved too, I don't think that alone is going to help me to rank on 1st-2nd page in English and boost the visitors..

Thank you all for the clarification, the advice seems to be a consistent "don't buy it"

Click to expand...

To get guest post cheaper since money is an issue at the moment. You have to send a mail to the site publishers or authors, the prices are usually 50% ot what you'll be charged on here or elsewhere, because you've eliminated the middleman.

BH won't be easy to deal with if you've no prior knowledge in sorting links. Hire someone to take care of that.

How serious is the investment op? And time? I wouldn’t risk it if it’s very high in either case.

There’s a lot you can do to help your site without trying to diddle.

Save the blackhat stuff for experimenting and use on “serious” projects only once you feel you know what you’re doing.

Blackhat techniques can be used upto some extent but don't fully go with this.

Just mix and all is fine.

Sounds like the perfect time to get your hands involved with some black hat techniques. make sure to lay white had techniques and add a bit of black hat techniques.

PerfectALT said:

Blackhat techniques can be used upto some extent but don't fully go with this.

Click to expand...

Depends.... some all BH FAST. Some a mix. Never just WH he he