Powerful Blackhat Tips… That Used to Work

Many webmasters gun for the easy way to seize  top rank in the search engines. Back in the early 2000s, it was easy to fool google. A few tricks and voila- you’re number 1 in the search rankings. Some such methods worked so well that blackhatters sold of 4 page PDFs for $200 describing these techniques. Are you guilty of deploying these methods?

Using Doorway pages
Doorway pages are fastloading html file no larger than 10K. They contain just the keywords you’d like to rank for and have a single link pointing to your main index pages. Since it’s devoid of nonerelated words, it’s tends to rank highly for the specific keywords populated into its metatags, body text and hidden text.

Often, the webmaster creates 10 to 50 doorway pages with related keywords pointing to one site. Doorway pages don’t rank so well anymore. I’ve noticed them deindexed from sites I’ve done consulting for.

Link  Link Purchasing

Is it blackhat? Yep it is. You’re essentially buying votes to ascend the pagerank scale. The old days saw webmasters paying up to $2000 a month on large newsites to leech off pagerank. It worked until google got smart. They devalued links from syndicated news networks that pointed to viagra sites, sex sites and the like. The purchase of links is such dangerous business these days that Pagerank7 sites can drop to PR2 overnight when caught selling links. Learn from Johnchow.com where he doesn’t even rank for his namesake!

Keyword Stuffing/Hidden Text

Okay I was guilty of this in 2001. I stuffed my site with almost 200 words of unrelated white text. It got me ranking alright- but when Firefox got out, hidden text stood out like a sore thumb. Not to mention, google fired me a courtesy note and knocked me off my pedestal. I fixed it and within two days, got my PR5 back. I’m never doing that again.

Cyber Hoaxing

My best bud started a news site that looked like CNN online and populated it with sensational news. Like the WhiteHouse going under fire from Shiite rebels and Angelina Jolie going to shady houses. Pretty soon inbound links piled up to the hundreds of thousands as every digger and his brother buzzed about it. The fame was shortlived (and the Pagerank 7)…. when media men started questioning the veracity of his news.

Oh well.. he’s Pagerank 5 now but its not worth it after getting lots of death threats.

Splog Campaigning

In 2004, some wise guys created automated software that creates hundreds of thousands of blogs on the fly filled with scraped content drawn from rss feeds. The intention was simple: to point to a single site that was Made for Adsense. The method worked for a year and catapulted fresh sites to PR5 in a month. Then google deindexed the farms and banned the adsense account.

Link Spamming

This method probably never will die. The blackhatter uses automated software that fires millions of viagra spam links to unprotected blogs via proxylists and comment boxes.  Ask askimet about the surge of blog spam. Maybe a billion is filtered on a daily basis. My sites get bombarded each but thank got for the filtration software.

So… are any of you still guilty of oldhat blackhat?

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