3 Ways To Turn Blackhat SEO Into Whitehat SEO
There are always ways to turn bad into good. However, this is especially true with search engine optimization. People have been using questionable techniques to rank high in search engines for years. As a result, people have been penalized on or even banned from search engines for years. But nobody said you can’t turn blackhat SEO into whitehat SEO and bring big results with no risk of penalization. Plus, knowing how to turn unethical to ethical unlimits the quantity and quality of the techniques you can use optimize your website for maximum exposure coming from search engines.
How?
This can be done relatively easily. To start, think of a blackhat search engine optimization technique that you know about. Next, think about what makes your technique unethical. For example, if you think of keyword stuffing, the part of keyword stuffing that makes it a blackhat technique is the fact that you are overusing keywords in your page intentially.
So the next step is to extract the whitehat part of your technique and make it seperate from the blackhat part. So continuing from my previous example, with keyword stuffing, if you take out the part where you are stuffing keywords into your page, you end up with the most powerful whitehat content writing search engine optimization tip ever: use important keywords in your content. Although writing content with keywords is nothing new, you now see the power of coming up with new ethical and organic SEO techniques by bouncing off blackhat ones.
Examples
Blog Spamming
- Question: What makes blog spamming a blackhat technique? Answer: The fact that it is spamming.
- Take spamming out of the equation, and we have a whitehat technique.
Blog commenting, although I personally use it more for building relationships with other bloggers, can easily be used to build powerful backlinks. Think about it. Dofollow blog comments are links from powerful blog posts from powerful bloggers in your niche. Plus, blog comments are a great way to have a discussion not only with a blogger, but other commentators!
Cloaking
- Question: What makes cloaking a blackhat technique? Answer: The fact that you are showing one page to users and another to search engines makes cloaking a blackhat technique. Plus, the page that you show to search engines probably uses other blackhat techniques like keyword stuffing.
- Take all of that blackhat stuff out of cloaking, and what do we have? The most powerful content writing SEO technique ever.
We have the same technique we get from “whitehatifying” keyword stuffing. Writing great, keyword-rich content and showing the same page to users and search engines is as organic as you can get. One tip I can give you on it is to always think of search engine optimization during your writing. This will have a very positive effect on the on-page optimization of your content.
Mass Article Submission
- Question: What makes mass article submission a blackhat technique? Answer: With mass article submission, you are submitting the same (often bad) content to hundreds or even thousands of websites.
- Extract the blackhat part of mass article submission out and what do you get? Guest posting.
Guest posting is amazingly powerful, and not just on an SEO level. It brings dofollow backlinks from the powerful pages of other bloggers, but it also has the potential to drive thousands of targeted readers to your website, and all after the the effort of writing a single article. If you aren’t familiar with guest posting, learn more: The Power Of Guest Posting.
Finding clever and powerful search engine optimization techniques doesn’t have to be hard, especially now that you know how to turn blackhat SEO into whitehat SEO to bring results.
Thanks for reading! If you liked these search engine optimization tips, please consider retweeting and sharing this article!
Have anything to say? Share it with us in the comments!
There’s more to search engine optimization than what meets the eye. Karan Singhal focuses on helping clients in increasing their search engine exposure. He is a blogger and search engine optimization consultant. You can read more about his solutions at Trafficke SEO Services. Karan shares more advice at the Trafficke Blog and you can follow him @Trafficke.
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18 Responses to “3 Ways To Turn Blackhat SEO Into Whitehat SEO”
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I blog comment when I have something to say, for the most part. Sometimes that helps build relationships, which is awesome. Sometimes that helps build links, which is also awesome. If a blog is DoFollow, it can sometimes help my “blab-blab-blab” side win over the “I’m-too-lazy-to-write-a-full-comment” side. Same thing if it’s on a blog of someone I already know and like.
However, I am not sure that a) mass article distribution is black hat, nor b) that taking something out of it makes it guest posting. I would think these are totally different things, perhaps using the same basic information.
Karan Singhal Reply:
May 31st, 2010 at 11:50 pm
Google has publicly said that it does not approve of techniques where articles are published more than once or rewritten. Therefore, mass article distribution is blackhat. In my opinion, any technique where you use duplicate content to rank higher isn’t organic.
Guest posting is, if you think about it, mass article submission where you take it slow and write one article for each submission.
Thanks for your thoughts, David!
Interesting article and twist. However, you’re looking at it from the angle of blackhat came before white hat… which I think is quite the opposite…
All blackhat techniques orginated from whitehat techniques but were usually overdone and misused, which led to it being termed blackhat.. Or at least that’s the way I see it, and your post acutally confirms it for me.
I guess you could look at it as which came first, the chicken or the egg…
I agree, blackhat techniques originally only came from webmasters who thought they could bypass whitehat ones for better search engine rankings. But today, blackhat techniques come from creative minds, and they’re not usually based of whitehat ones. But you can still use them to find whitehat ones.
Nice learning from such black hat SEO. And I really like the last point, it is true that guest posting already became great replacement of article submitting. And we can do it in mass and still consider as white hat.
That is really great tips!!! thanks very much.
I will translate it into Chinese. and I will mention it in my website.
I guess cloaking isn’t completely a black hat thing. For instance, if you have arts and crafts based website or you have a lot of images (just images) and no place for text, I don’t think that would be a SEO friendly page. In that case, cloaking is better deal because you can create 2 pages, one having text for search engines and the other one with images for web surfers.
What are your thoughts?
That’s good idea avoid use of cloaking and create a page with keyword rich content page for search engines and users. Good tips.
Mass article submission and spamming i.e. making comments like ‘thanks, such a great post’ are what i have been most advised against doing. I see it in use so often and it does actually really annoy me to pieces. It shows you don’t really have anything to say and how unserious you actually are as to what you feel and what you know about the actual subject in question. As mentioned, if you’re going to make comments, make sure you really are making a comment, not ‘recycling’ a load of old nonsense.
I hate getting blog comments that are generic, and probably from people that don’t even read your post. I always love a good detailed comment, shows they’re appreciative and interest.
All I can say is that times have change, what use to be blackhat seo, aren’t necessarily as bad as portrayed. Good post.
Blog Spamming is nerve-wracking, I face the problem everyday.
Spaming in the law is only for emails ;p
I found article marketing works best when you change the articles at least slightly every now and then. Also, good articles create traffic and that’s much better than just a link
Google has banned my blog because of result pages containing auto generated contents. I have removed all the scripts and plugins. However, I don’t know how to release it from the ban.. Any body helps me. please.
Most link building by most SEO firms is not “natural” and is in fact blackhat according to Google. If you have to pay for it, ask for it, comment for it or insert a link in your article to gain it, then you are manipulating Google search results and Google terms that as blackhat. You just need to view the many video’s by Matt Cutts to realize that if you are doing any of the above, then you are creating links manually and you violating Google’s TOS.
It simply baffles me how many SEO experts will quickly denounce Cloaking as “unethical” or against Google’s TOS or even label it as spam which manipulates search results but then on a daily basis create artificial, manual or software generated backlinks for clients.
If you are distributing countless articles with links or posting on blogs/forums to obtain backlinks or using automated backlinking software, isn’t that also spamming to manipulate search engine results?
What is the difference? It all violates Google’s TOS.
So does “blackhat” or being “unethical” really exist anymore? Isn’t this really about traffic, conversions and surviving within an ever tightening monopoly created by Google for which we now are left with few other options, unless to line the pockets of Google shareholders.
These are very nice ways to share information on search engine optimization. Although search engine optimization is good for a site it should not be black hat People should just be doing their own SEO.