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White vs. Black Hat SEO - How to choose between them and transform risky tactics into stable, long term wins

Presentation by Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder, SEOmoz, to SMX Sydney 14 April 2011

The majority of the presentation is transcribed below:

Why Choose White Hat?

#1: You've Got Nothing to Hide
#2: No Long-Term Risk
#3: Every Action Builds Marketing Value (outside of just SEO)

12 Black Hat Tactics Transformed into Long Term, White Hat Wins

#1B: Crappy, Pay-to-List Directories
#1W: Awesome Resource Lists

#2B: Email Requests to Rent Links
#2W: Email Offers to Create Content
Starting with connections and reciprocation on social media is a great way to build a relationship prior to requesting content contribution. It's more likely to get a yes, too.

#3B: Sponsored Wordpress Theme Links
Tragically, despite Wordpress' efforts to kill sponsored themes, they persist in all shapes and forms. This blog post explains: http://angelanatcus.com/sponsor-a-wordpress-theme-and-drive-traffic-to-your-site/
#3W: Useful Wordpress Plugins
You don't even need to build something necessarily relevant to your site! If you just contribute a useful plugin, you will earn authentic links from folks who appreciate it.

#4B: Fake Twitter Accounts to Tweet/RT Links
#4W: Build Highly Followed, Real Twitter Accounts

#5B: Sitewide Footer Links
#5B: Sitewide Footer Links
When I was in Italy, I noticed that many, many sites there seem to like the sitewide footers with anchor text as a linking tactic. Unfortunately, these are often devalued.
#5W: Sitewide Links to a Partner Page
Instead of a direct link without much context, we link to a page explaining our relationship and why we're endorsing this company. We've done this in the past with all our partnerships, and CTR is often higher!

#6B: Cloaking Text on a Page
#6W: Make that Content Visible in a CSS Tab

#7B: Reciprocal Link Pages
#7W: Give + Receive Testimonials
Testimonial rule via the always excellent and greatly missed Kathy Sierra: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/02/rethinking_test.html

#8B: Automated Link Drop Spam
When you see links like this, then search for those keywords and see the target websites rank it's the worst feeling
#8W: Authentic Comment Marketing
A comment on Mark Suster's blog led to a post, links + tweets from him, and an in-person breakfast in Los Angeles. It's a perfect example of how authentic web marketing wins more than just SEO.

#9B: Falsified Facebook "Like" Buttons
Some nefarious black hats will make the Facebook "like" button trigger from clicks on other parts of the page. Watch your status bar to be sure of what you're clicking when browsing sketchy portions of the web.
#9W: Earn Shares! They Can't Be Gamed, But They're Way More Powerful
Screenshot from http://unbounce.com/blog/ which just rocks in general and should be read by every organic web marketer.
Correlation of Social Media-Based Factors(data via Topsy API & Google Buzz API)
Although voters thought Twitter data / tweets to URLs were more influential, Facebook's metrics are substantially better correlated with rankings.

#10B: Article "Spinning"
"Spinning" is where sites re-write a single piece of content using software or low cost writers dozens-hundreds of times and publish all over the web to get links or visits.
#10W: Content Syndication
The creative commons licensing system can work very well for some folks http://creativecommons.org/choose/ – or you can create your own license rules.

#11B: Cloaking for Search Bots
I don't understand why anyone even does this anymore. It's such a high risk, low return behavior, and it's so rare that there's value in showing different content to bots vs. users.
#11W: Use Cookies/Logins to Show Varied Content Based on Behavior
Always make sure that the default, search visitor, non-logged-in experience matches what search engines see, or you could still fall foul of cloaking guidelines.

#12B: Using Link Brokers
#12B: Costs of "Buying" Links
#12W: Hire a Director of Inbound Marketing
Just today, he created an eBook of an article using Themeforest + other tools and then blogged about how anyone can do it: http://unbounce.com/social-media/how-i-created-a-viral-ebook-landing-page-for-8-using-themeforest-paywithatweet-kissinsights-and-unbounce/

We need to stop pretending that black hat is OK. It hurts our entire industry's opportunity, and it's a lazy, short-term approach to building a business on the web.

Last updated: 18 April 2011

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