Is Whitehat SEO Still Working

Thought provoking post as usual Phillip.

Personally I'm tired of the white hat VS black hat labeling that SEOs get.

On a side note, when are you going to complete those interview questions I sent you?

I'm really interested in hearing what you have to say and I think others are too.

It's all about outsourcing, whitehat works great if someone else does it for you and spends their time doing it. You can make great money online with time/effort. Especially with the time/effort of 10+ people ;D

Disagree, for stable performance of the website,, you should engaged with WHITE HAT SEO...

It works, but in this age of mass automation and outsourcing, the "real" content is being swamped. However, Googles "pure" internet never has been and never will be a reality anywhere else than in their control freak minds.

Great links though, had not seen those posts (must check my RSS reader more often...), they confirm what a lot of us have been saying - listen to Google and stay whitehat and you fall on your arse 9 times out of 10.

No different than having a "homepage" you made in wordpres or joomla or the like and ranking that up for keywords, then linking that site as your "homepage" to your e-commerce site... that's actually the exact thing I'm in the process of doing for a big customer.

Couple $100k/year small business... only issue I'm having is he's starting from scratch on his website and e-commerce.... good and bad.

Good: I get to do the SEO from the ground up and build the e-commerce so I know everything about everything.

Bad: It's brand spanking new, so it's going to take time to get some quality backlinks and get up in the SERPS


WHITEHAT seo better still work! haha... that's all I'm using. Going for the long-haul here.

My friend blogs about technology (specifically virtualization for a particular unix platform). His content is top notch and he ranks all over the place for just about every imaginable keyword.

He's in a niche, he's got great content and gets decent content. He has no idea what SEO is, no interest in learning.

How did he get to the top?

1. Participating in technical forums.
2. Submitting his site to directories.
3. Blog posting (relevant stuff) to other people's blogs.

He has no adsense and has no interest in putting up ads on his site. It's just personal promotion (it gets him consulting gigs, writing gigs etc..).

So yeah - the "white hat" approach works fine.

"white hat" IMO is also a subjective term because Google has never been consistent about stuff in this area.

If you consider white hat to be blog commenting, guest blogging, article marketing, content syndication - then yeah. Those techniques work fine too.

Honestly - the most effective way to do this is to buy links discretely. Just email the people (skip the link exchanges) and ask for a link or text ad that contains a do-follow link.

If you're paranoid - find people in your niche that are clueless about marketing & SEO.

There's no way Google can figure out you did this (since you're avoiding the link exchanges etc.).

A+ to Rand for providing us good lists of sites to reverse engineer their backlinks. I'll be busy all week.

P.S. Is this really new to anyone? Has 100 percent natural linkbuilding ever worked unless you had lots of cash, a large team, or lots of time?

Tom

Yes, it still works great. Just ask my long list of offline clients that are having great results.

I have three problems with the white hat/black hat distinction.

First, pure white hat means writing great content and hoping people will link to it. What if your visitors don't want content? I do a lot of offline consulting. A lot of my client's customers don't want content - they want beautiful flowers, or a good project manager, or some attorney who will get them out of jail. They'll go to wiki if they want content. What they want is to find someone good to hire. Yet according to Google, if I want to be white hat, I must still generate a bunch of content for these guys and charge them for it.

Second, it takes a long time for pure white hat to work. In fact, Grey Wolf (in the article above) says it never will. And he has data to back it up. So I'm promoting an attorney website by an attorney who used to be at a big firm. He's really good. His site is getting clobbered by attorneys who are nowhere near as good. Why shouldn't he be able to promote himself actively? He's good. He could benefit people who need him. Do I go back to him and say, "Sorry, bad decision to leave the firm with the established website and form a new firm with a new website. Now you have to wait three years until your website naturally attracts traffic"? That will never happen. Other attorneys in my town are very aggressive marketers. He'll never rank if he doesn't build links.

Third, most of the people who claim they do white hat are violating Google's Editorial Guidelines. Go to www.seowhitehats.com and see what they offer. Nearly all of it is manipulated linking (articles, forums, commenting, exchanges). All black hat according to Google.

This is getting ridiculous, I agree. If you look at 90% of the white hat linking sold on this forum, Google would consider it black hat, strictly speaking. So, it's gray hat. It violates Google's Editorial Guidelines but it's reasonable, customary, and not excessive.

So, what's the line between gray hat and black hat? When does it stop being article marketing and start being article spamming? When does it stop being blog commenting and start being blog spamming? Look at Lexorsoft, very popular on this forum. It's almost all black hat by Google standards.

And if you don't participate, you'll never get your website on page one.

Here's a good article on the topic:
There's no such thing as advanced white hat seo
There’s no Such Thing as Advanced White Hat SEO | SEO BlackHat: Black Hat SEO Blog

The conclusion is that white hat seo boils down to this:
1) Site Architecture – Can be learned in 4 hours or less.
2) Analytics – Can you install a javascript and log in?
3) PPC – Even though we used to call that SEM . . .
4) Content – which is better handled by copywriters.

In other words, if you're doing white hat seo, all money you pay to get traffic to your website should go to copywriters and Google. Pretty good racket for Google.

Great articles. Thanks for sharing them. After reading them, I get the feeling that the war between relevancy and spam will be ongoing.

Black hat techniques will always work to a degree but their effectiveness will ultimately always be reduced. Occasionally they rise and get everybody excited only to be snuffed out relatively soon thereafter. SEO is a long term, ongoing pursuit.

Personally, I am sticking with white hat techniques and don't worry about it. I try to produce relevant content and let the chips fall where they may.

That being said, you can use white hat techniques in a slightly darkened way...

I'm also focusing in white hat techniques and base on my observation it still works as long as it is optimize regularly...

Anyway since this is the topic...

I'm confused if link farm is dangerous? They said its a black hat technique

What if I have 800 sites that allow me to post my articles together with my targeted links?

Please share your opinion

Jacob,
Many thanks for the brilliant post, it's appreciated

Yep I do agree that using automated tools doesn't automatically lead to trouble. I guess I was trying to make the point that people using tools to (for example) send out dozens of links per profile or blog post (i.e. people who genuinely spam and not just leave 1-3 links per profile/blog post, which I agree is fine overall) is something I'd consider black hat.

I definitely agree that automated tools and methods are fine overall though, thanks for the thought-provoking post.

white hat, takes time yet its worth doing..it gives good results and long term benefits..

What do you define as whitehat SEO? Can SEO be whitehat?

I am not on Google's side here, but if, for a second, you think like them, you will realize that SEO is nothing but creating original content that people will give backlinks to it naturally in time. Other than that, creating your own backlinks in no matter what way, cannot be something whitehat.

This is the most obvious truth that non of us, internet marketers, want to accept. Think of the %90 of the web sites that rank on the first page for all the keywords you can imagine, are they building backlinks to their sites just like us or they are on the first page because people like their content and share with others?

Well, although what I just said above makes sense to me, this will not stop me building my own backlinks until I find a way to create great content that people share and give backlinks to...

Yes please. Don't use automation and do everything exactly the way Big Bro...I mean Google says.
Meanwhile my kids need to be fed. I'll wear whatever hat that takes. With a clear conscience, knowing I won.

Its still working but it will takes time to mature and get the results, always do the right thing create quality content that will link to the other sites that are relevant to your site do this by blog posting great article that are informative and usable to others, blog commenting, directory submission, article submission, and forums.

"My friend blogs about technology (specifically virtualization for a particular unix platform). His content is top notch and he ranks all over the place for just about every imaginable keyword."

I can see that. I am going to bet he breaks news or does tutorials. In that niche you don't have to be the primary source of news you just have to be the first place alot of people read about it.

I find all that white - black hat seo non-sense. After all what Google Adsense is ? Make people to CLICK using all kind of ways (blends, etc etc). Cheating them.

Don't get me wrong. I use adsense my self.

Doing white hat seo will decrease the chance of getting ban through search engines..

When it comes to white hat SEO, it takes time to get result, but if you are looking for permanent solutions to get good result then white hat SEO is thing, where you can start and finish.