Hacker News Reader

Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

Eh, a little bit. I'm not in the black-hat world anymore, and I'm pretty sick of people pretending like they're magicians or rocket scientists because they can rank something. Google has a system, you beat the system, that's it.

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.

View on HN

Eh, I disagree with your definition of "white hat SEO".

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.

Fair enough, but if forum links aren't white hat then 99% of SEO companies/freelancers are black hat. I have yet to hear an SEO company say "We'll make your product great enough people will link to it organically."

True, an agency can't do much about a product. But they can produce content that will attract links. And they can find people who should be linking to you, but aren't because they haven't heard of you.

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."

There's a pretty big gap between forum links and nothing.

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.

Amen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com