It's going to be great for those of us building out quality sites though!
1. Buy a ton of domains 2. Put up picture-based landing pages on those domains. The user only really sees pictures. 3. Put up or spin content with relevant keywords, put it underneath the images. Google only sees a couple pictures (it doesn't know what they are) and a bunch of really relevant content. 4. Build a shiz-ton of links. This is where black hatters really make their money. I usually build about 125,000 links/day from completely legit sites, and to Google it pretty much looks like it's going viral. If you know where to get the links, know how to generate the content, and can make them seem human, Google has a really hard time finding you. 5. Link the landing pages to your money site using affiliate links. 6. Wait until your site gets manually reviewed and pulled down.
So any somewhat decent black-hatter will have hundreds of sites in the works at any given time. The worry of taking a site down isn't a big one, even though if you take down one site a black-hatter's traffic could drop 3,000 visits/day. The sites I work on usually remain up for an average of 6 months at a time, and the only way for them to be caught is a manual review. Some only stay up for a couple weeks, but some stay up for years. There have been times when landing pages are getting a couple thousand visits a day but I haven't had time to go back through and redirect the traffic to the money site or update them from the generic landing page.
Since all of the actions taken mimic closely enough what humans would do, it's really difficult to be caught by webspam teams.
In my mind it's really difficult to differentiate between what most people call "white-hat" SEO and what I used to do ("black-hat"). White hat SEO (which is basically posting links in forums, blog comments, etc.) is trying to manipulate Google's search engine manually, black-hat is automating it and doing it at scale.
White hat is about earning links. A arms length third party has to give you a link for it to count.
That means it has a lot more to do with Public Relations than Page Rank.
If you drop a link yourself in a forum or blog comment, that's fundamentally NOT white hat. That's just non-automated black hat. That's also been below Google's radar.
This is the fundamental problem with SEO... People like you and me who are arguably 'experts' disagree about these definitions.
Ignorant clients hear "forums links are white hat" and reasonably extrapolate that "automated forum links are just scalable white hat SEO." And then they get into trouble.
I've seen it happen at some very well-funded startups. The marketing team looks like geniuses... for a while. Until they get nailed, then they claim they were tricked by a black hat SEO firm.
A websticker program, for instance, that is marketed via actual direct contact with potentially valuable partners, can provide high-quality in-bound links that are voluntary and durable. True, this works better in B2B than B2C. For B2C, an affiliate or discount program can do similar things. These can be supported by advertising as well.
These sorts of programs take a commitment, though. You're not going to make a quick big splash this way. But they do work over time, particularly since Google values age in both domains and inbound links.
That's what the best ones like CitationLabs and Eric Ward do.
A really good SEO can produce 100-150 truly earned links a month. But that would cost you $15k/mo and most clients aren't willing to make that kind of long term investment.
Why won't they invest is a question for another thread, but I suspect blackhats have created a "market for lemons."
I would have though this is a no brainer for Google to catch these days. I though text under pictures would be like white text on white and would set off immediate alarm bells.
Is that not because Google has successfully eliminated the long term viability of the tactics? Sitting on the sideline (sort of) it looks to be easier and easier to get rankings the "right" way and harder and harder to get them the "wrong" way.
Google has never been good at handling short term black hat spam (buy viagra is the colloquial example always). They are good at filtering sites out after they've been ranked for a while though.
But when these blackhatters are making tens of thousands of dollars a day with their short term rankings, it's hard to convince them that they need to be focusing on the long term rankings avenue...