BlackHat SEO News & Reviews

As I constantly read what people have to say about black hat SEO, I came across this definition in Wikipedia:

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines’ algorithms, or by a manual site review.

One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list.

What I found interesting is that this definition gives two examples of black hat SEO that are really really outdated. Cloaking by user-agent and keyword masking are a couple of the “oldest tricks in the book” so to speak, and are a couple of tactics that the search engines are now equipped to spot easily and penalize quickly.

If we want a more up-to-date explanation of Black Hat SEO from wikipedia, we have to look up what is being labeled “spamdexing”. This includes much better information such as doorway pages, hidden links, link farms, etc. I recommend the spamdexing page of Wikipedia as a reference to get a base for more Black Hat SEO techniques, since many of those STILL WORK!!!

Here is THE way to get traffic from YouTube using ONLY free tools:

1. Pick a headline that provokes clicks. Use keywords only if it’s convenient. Just like a salesletter’s headline is the most important part of getting people to read it, a YouTube video’s headline is the most important factor in getting people to click it to watch. Be controversial!

2. Use good showmanship. That means make them curious, don’t reveal the best part until the end, and use a cliffhanger ending like Empire Strikes Back where people don’t know if Darth Vader is really Luke’s father or not. Make them desperate to take some kind of action.

3. Dare to make people angry. At least they’ll remember you. Make it emotional somehow at least.

4. Get them to click your link or type in your domain. DON’T brand the video with your domain the entire time. Build up and show it at the end or add one of those arrows that points to the side box where you’ve put your link. To make links on YouTube, make the URL the first thing in your description box and start with http.

5. Use FREE tools to help. TubeMogul.com will submit your video to a bunch of sites, and it’s totally free. No software required! The next is Tube-Surfer.net which will surf your video over and over racking up tons of views so your video can get popular. You gotta leave your browser open, so turn it on before you go to bed. This will make you video appear “cooler” and will attract more REAL views.

That’s it. You could pay a lot of money to other “gurus” to teach you this but here is the real deal that works. I know from experience. That’s why I have a video with well over 100,000 views. It started with the fake ones and took off.

When I first saw Twitter, I thought it was the dumbest trend I’d ever seen in online social media. Now I see it as a way to take advantage of other people’s popularity and get your name out there. If you use Twitter the way it’s “intended” to be used, your benefits will be really small compared to what you could get.

I’m not, however, recommending you get one of those apps that makes spam accounts and spams people on Twitter. That’s a cool deal, but not the way I would use the site. Here are a few tips and tricks to taking more advantage of Twitter but also staying under the radar.

• Go to TweetLater.com and set up your account to forward the emails you get about getting followed to their autoresponder, which you can put in a brief welcome and plug your site. This can get you lots of traffic and goes to people’s INBOX.
• Find somebody popular on Twitter (like Shoemoney, who has over 5,000 followers) and start following their followers. Many will start following you, and getting your emails. That’s like STEALING a guru’s email list!
• Once you’ve maxed out, stop following some of the old people and start following others. Many people won’t notice you’re no longer following them even though they’re still following you.
• Don’t send more than 10 tweets per day, and don’t include links in every tweet. You want to APPEAR like a normal white hat user.
• Create more Twitter accounts and target specific NICHES. People who follow Willie Crawford are likely to be internet marketers on the Warrior Forum, for example. Start to target niches by who people follow and match your promotional tweets to the interests of those people.

This little method is simple but can make you a twitter celeb and get some good LASTING traffic to your site.