This post is meant for educational purposes only. I have not ever used black hat methods to drive revenue/traffic and do not openly endorse the actions described in this article. Furthermore, I propose black hat strictly in the short-term.

A lot of people ask about black hat SEO as a means toward outsized short-term gains. Many consider black hat to be unethical, but I feel that it is important to understand the inner-workings of websites. The reason people want to hear about “black hat” methods (as opposed to “white hat,” or more ethical) is precisely this… it seems illegal. I want to assure you that most black hat methods are completely legal, just unethical and frowned upon by major networks.

What Is Black Hat SEO?
We need to start with a basic question, what exactly do I mean by black hat SEO? Essentially, this is a phrase that describes using “unfair” techniques to drive results in search engine listings among other things. Most typically, the traffic or artificial clicks that you gain from using black hat methods are extremely temporary… used for short term gains. There is always the risk of being banned from networks like YouTube, Google or StumbleUpon, so caution and patience are always recommended.

Many successful bloggers have used black hat methods at some time in their careers. It seems that you are almost foolish if you shun the techniques altogether, so I encourage you to keep an open mind. I believe that we all need to be willing to step down from our pedestal sometimes, as there are cases that white hat is just too impractical to cut it. With an open mind, let’s have a look at some black hat SEO techniques for making money online!

Popular Black Hat Methods
There are literally hundreds of variations in black hat techniques, as the phrase is applied to anything in business that appears unfair or shady in nature. I want to have a look at some of the more traditional methods, though I might explore particular methods in-depth in separate articles on theNetFool.com.

Keyword Stuffing
Stuffing keywords is a bit like spamming a search engine. To keyword stuff is to take a targeted term phrase, let’s use “make money” as an example, and repeat it excessively throughout your page in an attempt to maximize your search engine ranking positions (SERP). You can have the targeted term reflected in your page, meta tags, alt, titles, links and more. Though it may be considered slightly “old school” as there are many filters nowadays to defeat this practice… it is very possible to achieve a degree of keyword stuffing that won’t get you banned and will help your search engine rankings.

Doorway or Gateway Pages
Some webmasters have been able to manufacture so-called “doorway” or “gateway” pages that are little more than invisible pages that are only seen by search engine spiders and are used to increase SEO ranks. By heavily optimizing a website page for a search engine, it is very possible to artificially boost your SERPs while redirecting real visitors safely to your website before they know any better.

Google has been known to support the growth of these artificial gateway pages by redesigning their algorithm to favor overall trust over actual content… letting black hat professionals exploit previously established websites for high placements. There are even services like The Content Solution that automatically generate loads of keyword-rich content, supposedly desirable by search engines.

Cookie Stuffing
The practice of cookie stuffing is one of the more easily mastered black hat SEO techniques on the web that involves secretly embedding a cookie into a visitor’s web browser without them ever knowing about it or even having to click a link. In other words, you can use a fake image in a forum signature and have every view of the image count just as if someone had clicked it. Devious, eh?

People (like myself) like to keep the actual method of cookie stuffing on the down low. I am not going to tell you the method, nor will I respond to any email requests. I will however, summarize the general idea.

Cookie stuffing happens everywhere, a lot more than you would expect. By using it, you can effectively get thousands of false and undeserved affiliate impressions to a banner you have visible on a website. This is one of those methods that can be illegal if worked to an extreme degree. The average web surfer won’t have a cookie notifier enabled, so it is generally pretty easy to score some free clicks from embedding your own (especially if done through flash software).

What is essentially being done behind the scenes, is some clever work with an .htaccess file on a remote server that redirects all views of an image to an affiliate link. This referral link is in fact exposed, which makes it risky. However, you can effectively go about stealing sales money away from deserving advertisers if you are using cookie stuffing to re-route things in your favor.

Invisible Text
Not as advanced as stuffing keywords, using invisible text is one of the more simple techniques thought of as black hat. Essentially, “invisible” text refers to writing up lists of keywords on particular websites in the color white, or the background color, so that they cannot be seen on the page (without highlighting, of course). By using invisible text, it is possible to feed through lots of rich content to search engines and users. However, this technique is becoming more easily detected every day.

Black Hat Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Management
We think of PPC campaigns as having rules. Some rules help you run more effective advertising campaigns; others will actually set up competitive barriers. Black hat PPC management is the art of doing away with the rules set up by networks to gain competitive advantages.

There are several ways to exploit PPC campaigns to gain an edge. The first is to remove the requirement of direct url’s for your ads. To do this, we need to set up a layer between us and our affiliate network so that it is possible to make changes to the target link without losing revenue. You can also do things like use a non-budget-function strategy to optimize your earnings or cloak PPC editors to covertly apply pop-up ads to your campaigns. Try this article to explore PPC black hat further.

Comment Spam
If you run a blog or have ever commented around the blogosphere, you know exactly what I mean when I refer to comment spam. We all see the irrelevant messages with complex “names” that look like they were written by a two-year old. These comments are being automatically generated for the purpose of collecting backlinks to other websites being promoted. By dropping massive amounts of comments, it is possible to boost SERP rankings and traffic by making Google think you own an established and rooted website.

There are many scripts that people use to seek out blogs that have comments easily available (no word-verification, dofollow, etc.). Here’s one. Whoops . But seriously, these comment spam generators have their days numbered with the flurry of spam-defeating blockers like Akismet that store logs on anyone found to be spamming. Use at your own detriment.

Why Is Black Hat So Unfair?
A lot of the times, black hat doesn’t actually void terms of service. However, more often than not it is considered an unethical practice that will get you banned nonetheless. A lot of these methods do not follow the rules and regulations of major search engines… as they attempt to artificially sugar-coat hastily made websites. User experience is key, and if you want to maximize your user base in the long run… white hat is the only way to fly as you will eventually get noticed.

Tools You Can Use At Your Own Risk
The guys at Digerati Marketing have composed a zipped file that contains a dozen or so known black hat tools that can help anyone interested get a foothold in the industry. This package is publicly available on their website. And while I don’t want you using the tools inside, it might not be a bad idea to see what other people are doing by having a look.

Bottom Line: Hopefully you now understand the advantages and pitfalls of black hat SEO techniques that are being used all around the internet. If you are trying to establish and maintain a successful and user-friendly website… you would be a fool to invest in black hat methods. However, many have found great success by employing a few of these techniques to win over some short term success.

-The Net Fool

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