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The term “Black Hat”  comes from the old cowboy western movies where all the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats.

Blackhat techniques are just shortcuts. Methods for quickly building large numbers of websites, creating large numbers of backlinks and generally tricking the search engines into sending you all the targetted traffic you could want!

There is nothing illegal about any of these techniques although they are considered unethical in the stricter whitehat circles where anything that bends the rules of the search engines is considered a mortal sin! It’s up to you whether you choose to accept the authority of the search engines to dictate what is right and wrong or whether you prefer to make your own rules and live by your own standards.

When I talk about building blackhat sites I’m not talking about a bit of keyword stuffing on otherwise whitehat sites, I’m talking about sites which are automatically generated with thousands of keyword optimized pages containing content automatically scraped, spun or generated.

This can be done either using whitehat platforms such as WordPress or Joomla and using tools to automate the creation of sites and delivery of content or with purpose made tools designed with mass production in mind.

Typically you would build a number of subsites on each domain, each with several hundred pages. This means that each domain can target 10s of thousands of keywords, including misspellings on each page can push this up into the millions!

So what do you do with these sites? Well for a long time the main use for mass generated sites has been making money from Adsense clicks. The two things go together hand in hand – simply by adding a few lines of code you can make money from any site in any niche. But things ain’t what they used to be with MFA’s or Made For Adsense Sites. Average click values have dropped considerably and the ever present risk of losing your Adsense account increases every day. There’s still plenty of money to be made with Adsense and it’s a great way to get started, but you can do better…much better!

The next step up the income ladder is using mass generated sites to display ads for affiliate products, when you see that you could be making $50 or more commission per sale it’s easy to see why! Of course it’s not as easy as Adsense otherwise everyone would be doing it. The biggest difference is you will need to find worthwhile affiliate products to promote in each niche but once you have found a few good products you can build as many sites as you like promoting them.

If you have your own products you can funnel traffic to them from mass generated sites. Imagine being able to have pages for every single possible keyword phrase combination (and misspellings and typos) relevant to your products and customers!

"But, WHY", I hear you cry "I can’t link to my lovely whitehat site from a grubby blackhat site, it’ll get me deindexed from the search engines for sure!"

Well no, I wouldn’t link directly to a site I care about from a blackhat site either. What I would do is place ads for my products on mass generated sites and use various techniques such as redirects to make sure that anyone clicking on the ads lands on my sales page but the search engine spiders can’t see the url being linked to. If I wanted to be extra careful then I would put another site between the blackhat sites and the whitehat site, simply by placing a sales page on a seperate domain and linking to that from the mass generated sites.

Below are some common Black Hat SEO techniques.

Keyword Stuffing: the practice of using a keyword or keyword phrase sometimes hundreds of times in order to trick a search engine into thinking that a page is relavant to a particular subject. It is ok to use a keyword phrase multiple times on a pages but it needs to be within about a 4% ratio to the rest of the page. This is also known as keyword density.

Cloaking: creating pages specifically for search engines to view that a user will never actually see. When search engines index a particular website a page specifically built for the search engine is brought up by a web server. These pages are often have nothing to do with the page the user will end up on.

Doorway pages: these are pages that are designed specifically for search engines and often redirect a user to another page on a website. They are created in effort to gain high rankings in the search engines but are generally full of poor content that would provide no value to a user.

Link Farms: Pages that contain hundreds of links in an effort to gain backlinks for a website. Some SEO companies will tell a client they will get them thousands of backlinks by automatically submit there website to websites and directories. There is no value to doing this because search engines are able to recognize link farms and place no value on their links, Remember back links help the most when they are from relevant, high quality websites.

What are you – white hat or black hat? Grey hat perhaps? Or do you just like to dabble but aren’t that fussed either way..?

For those of you still looking puzzled, white hat marketing is the good witch of the north to the black hat’s wicked witch of the west.