The downside of blackhat SEO - Keep this in mind!

I started a new website a month ago. Doesn't really matter what it was about - I just started it to test a few things.

I wrote some code and ran some experiments to see if a could get a new SEO-technique to work. And it did. 100% traffic from Google. Here's my traffic stats:



12,678 unique visitors in 30 days.

Cool, huh? Not exceptional in any way - but still over 10k visitors and the way traffic increased it would easily hit about 1k visitors/day within another week or so.

Why am I telling you this?



Well, As you can see the traffic just died yesterday. And today = no traffic at all.

And this is something you should keep in mind at all times when you do Grey/black hat stuff.

Especially with Google.

And believe it or not: This is not 100% black hat. There's nothing written in their guidelines about the stuff I did. Might be questionable, but they haven't de-indexed the page or given me any warning - Just decided to stop giving me organic traffic. It might come back one day, but very likely it won't.

So...
The reason I'm telling you this is simply to remind you that this is the way the black hat game is, and will always, be played.

And when you play that game, you can never assume anything. Especially not what's going to happen tomorrow, a week from now or even the next hour. Build your income and revenue overnight, and it's very likely to go away overnight as well.

I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with blackhat, just keep in mind that you could loose everything you've built when you least expect. (I have another 15, or so, websites (all white hat), so don't feel sorry for me. Just keep this in mind.)


So, here's what I'd like to discuss and ask YOU:

What do you think about this? How does it make you feel? Have this happened to you?

Black hat is about getting most money in shortest time possible.

fear91 said:

Black hat is about getting most money in shortest time possible.

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I thought it was about using non-allowed or unethical SEO techniques to your advantage? But I know what you mean.

superman100 said:

I thought it was about using non-allowed or unethical SEO techniques to your advantage? But I know what you mean.

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It is!!!

But by the very nature of it the gains can be expected to be short term. Because of that fear91 is right 'black hat is about getting most money in shortest time possible' before what you're doing becomes ineffective.

Ideally when using black hat seo techniques, you can give a site an advantage and then maintain that advantage longterm using white hat tactics. But as superman100 has pointed out, it doesn't always work out that way.

Or it can be used slowly and consistently as a time saver. Breaking captcha, automated account creation, and multiple automated article submission go against the TOS of most sites, but the end result is "grey hat" links and a lot of saved time.

About 5 years ago I was making on average $60000 a month from mobile phone sites, (my best month was 180k!!!! a once off). Not going to go into what I was doing but it was good and lasted about 3 years. About 2 years ago google changed how it dealt with mobile sites. I lost all my traffic overnight. Fired 6 full time employees and lots of part timers. I now work with one partner and we do ok. Although my methods were not blackhat (yes they were white hat) google can end the gravy train on a whim. So yes prepare to be de-indexed, sandboxed, whatever.. Google is a fickle master one who has no conscience and shows no remorse.

Are you sure this is not the sandbox effect?

flaktrak said:

About 5 years ago I was making on average $60000 a month from mobile phone sites, (my best month was 180k!!!! a once off). Not going to go into what I was doing but it was good and lasted about 3 years. About 2 years ago google changed how it dealt with mobile sites. I lost all my traffic overnight. Fired 6 full time employees and lots of part timers. I now work with one partner and we do ok. Although my methods were not blackhat (yes they were white hat) google can end the gravy train on a whim. So yes prepare to be de-indexed, sandboxed, whatever.. Google is a fickle master one who has no conscience and shows no remorse.

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Dude, ouch. But hey, that's how it goes. My experience has thought me that the saying about "not putting all eggs in one basket" is a good advice when it comes to building websites or online business depending on other services (Like Google or Facebook). Because, when you least expect, they'll change one thing or de-index one website (or revenue stream) and you'll be OUT.

Same goes for monetizing 100% with Adsense. The day they shut down your adsense account or freeze it you're done.

corbin2 said:

Are you sure this is not the sandbox effect?

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What makes you think so? Just asking.

I think keyword in the extreme left of the domain can help in the micro and mini niche.

And this graph shows nothing. It is just sandbox or google dance. keep adding more links or whatever you are doing and you will be back. It happens all the time to my websites and they always come back. Your website is just one month old. Google still doesn't know where to put you.

superman100 said:

What makes you think so? Just asking.

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Because one of my new sites lost all organic visitors as well. I didn't have that much traffic as you, but the drop was similiar. And your site is new as well so I thought we might have the same problem.

But I don't know what you did with your site. I guess I made mistakes when building backlinks. I've now sent my site for reconsideration to google and hope I will get my rankings back. Maybe this is an option for you as well.


BUT your message is right. We should not depend on google alone. Things like this can always happen and you can't do much about it...

i just visit bhw to get paid stuff for free and learn how you guys earn money from the internet, but i really have no interest in doing the blackhat method, coz i love the whitehat, it's generate me routine income every month... (even it was pain on my asxxx)

corbin2 said:

Because one of my new sites lost all organic visitors as well. I didn't have that much traffic as you, but the drop was similiar. And your site is new as well so I thought we might have the same problem.

But I don't know what you did with your site. I guess I made mistakes when building backlinks. I've now sent my site for reconsideration to google and hope I will get my rankings back. Maybe this is an option for you as well.


BUT your message is right. We should not depend on google alone. Things like this can always happen and you can't do much about it...

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Ok, now I know what you mean. Yeah, absolutely. And I don't blame them either as my website was built as a SEO experiment. I'll create a new website from scratch and see if I can get it working without being banned.

I didn't build any backlinks at all - But I guess my organic traffic was increasing too quickly. What a shame.

The weird thing is that it still has 6000+ pages indexed.

zverr said:

And this graph shows nothing. It is just sandbox or google dance. keep adding more links or whatever you are doing and you will be back. It happens all the time to my websites and they always come back. Your website is just one month old. Google still doesn't know where to put you.

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Well, in one way you're right, but it does show something: That my traffic disappeared overnight. I do long tail SEO, and the website had over 6000 pages indexed. I rarely rank #1 for any specific search term, but as you can see it's not a requirement to get traffic. Each phrase I target generates about 1% of the total traffic.

I don't do link building

I've thought about this a lot as I've debated whether to step into the BH ring. I once had a site that I built and forgot about. I noticed it started making money so I hired someone to start getting backlinks. I believe this person just added my site to a bunch of link farms. My traffic died down to nothing.

It seems to me though, that if this type of thing could really get you penalized with Google, why not just submit your competitor's site to link farms and get them banned? This is why I don't think G's algo will penalize you in the long run for link building. Long tail SEO on the other hand - well, that seems a bit more obvious to them I guess. And, do you really want to use G Analytics if you are using BH methods?