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Comment by skulquake | Hacker News Reader

I wish some of the "real" black hatters could come on here and speak. These guys are the ones putting together massive strategies/campaigns to rank across a wide variety of thousands of key terms. And there not writing about it. The techniques many people are talking about now were done maybe 2-3 years before this whole mess. They are so far ahead of what the "industry" is focused on it's not even funny.

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Some black hatters make money, but for every 1 who does, 50 don't. Spend some time on WarriorForum or SEOBook and you'll see a very low signal to noise ratio. Lots of people are just preying on people who want to get rich quick with now work by selling them hope in the form of "info products".

And the black hatters who make money could probably make just as much if they did something legit.

The worst part about black hat is eventually the wheels fall off and you have to start over. So you're playing a game that keeps you on a constant treadmill. It's just as bad as consulting as a way to make a living.

If you take the high road, you build real value you can exit on eventually.

You know there is a reason they don't participate on these forums... It's a waste of their time! They are so busy working their strategy, making money on the web, that any time spent on a discussion like this, while no money is made, is very low on their priorities.

I doubt they're making a ton on the hustle, but I agree that they're probably not the type to waste time discussing points with other, likely more hostile crowds.

What makes you doubt that? If there was no money to be made, these wouldn't be spam, Viagra Wordpress hacks or Phishing attempts.

You have no idea...

I've seen what some of them do, and it's not as impressive as you'd think. Most of it breaks and stops working inside of 24 months. Then it's on to the next scam. Not a lot different from fly-by-night snake oil salesmen.

Just the existence of spam doesnt prove it's a big oppotunity, just that it's better for some people than their opportunity cost.

Some make &10,000 a DAY.

Ever looked at the payday SERP in the UK? Google can't control it. I know at least 3-4 people who make £100,000 a year with just basic level spamming.

If I scaled this technique http://explicitly.me/serp-sniffing-a-long-tail-keyword-strat... , I could make the same amount of money without breaking a sweat by dumping Adsense on there, and shopping affiliate links.

The point is I don't choose to.

Thanks for posting that. It's funny-- your strategy is exactly the way I do lead gen for my customers. I wrote a bunch of software to sniff serps (great expression, btw) and find long tail keywords that will drive leads for the client.

Then we produce articles (we actually hire real journalists) to address the search intent behind the keywords. Then we post it on the client's site, and charge them for the leads we drive via organic search from that content.

The funny thing is, our customers just view it as "content marketing," not SEO. Search data (search vol, competition, etc.) guides our content strategy, but I don't view this part as either good or bad. Or even really "SEO". Why would anyone invest in content nobody is searching for?!?

If we spun content or used Markov chains to generate gibberish or hired incompetent writers via TextBroker for $10 a story, sure that's spam.

But my calculation is that spending $500+ on an article written by a journalist with domain expertise is going to win long term. And since the lead revenue makes the ROI calculation >1, why not invest in quality?

And we definitely don't make Google guess what keyword we think our article would help.

thats the route I would take as well. But, I would use SEMrush to sniff out the rankings for Demand Media and other content farms, and then create quality content to target those keywords, trying to displace their crap hat content.

ugh, consumer... cpms are too low! :-)

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