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HELP! I NEED ANSWERS! BLACK HAT? GREY HAT? WHITE HAT? HUH?

by LucyLane
15 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I am really hoping that somebody here can give me some answers because I have been working in SEO for nearly 10 years and I have just started working in the payday loan field...

My problem: There are sites that are getting CRAZY rankings and CRAZY traffic from Google but there is something funny going on there because they have tons of dedicated keyword pages at the bottom of the site OR they have 301 redirects and doorway pages OR they have 0 backlinks and 0 keywords and are somehow in the top 3 for the most competitive keywords out there.

Here they are:
whitepaydayloans.org.uk (no backlinks?? #1 for payday loan and payday loans in google.co.uk and 5 page website???)
paydayexpress.co.uk (awful design but a bajillion pages and obvious 'keyword pages' at the bottom)
fidopayday.co.uk (they were appearing as paydayboss.co.uk and that was being redirected to paydaylightning.co.uk just YESTERDAY and TODAY it's fidopayday - so what gives??)

Just do a search in Google.co.uk for payday loans and take a look - almost all the sites that are there look like super spammy sites or black hat or all of the above. So, why the hell isn't Google picking it up? How are these sites up there and staying up there? Why doesn't Google see what I see?

Can somebody give me answers?? Are they just paying for high PR backlinks? Are they just spamming for a short while until Google shuts them down only to sprout up again? HELP! :confused:

Thanks in advance - Lucy
#answers #backlink building #black #black hat seo #grey #grey hat #hat #huh #seo #white #white hat seo
  • Profile picture of the author mosthost
    They are masters of the Black Arts. Their secrets cannot be revealed.
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  • Profile picture of the author dmtaylor247
    They probably 301 high pr domains, if you know how to build pr then you might stand a chance, otherwise it will cost you a couple of thousand $$$ for domains..
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  • Profile picture of the author Ettienne
    Good SEO and huge social media influence, probably.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jammy
    I suspect you are just using the wrong tools to analyse.

    Take a look at whitepaydayloans.org.uk here:
    whitepaydayloans.org.uk - Site Explorer - Ahrefs

    That might answer some of your questions.
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    • Profile picture of the author Ettienne
      Originally Posted by Jammy View Post

      I suspect you are just using the wrong tools to analyse.

      Take a look at whitepaydayloans.org.uk here:
      whitepaydayloans.org.uk - Site Explorer - Ahrefs

      That might answer some of your questions.
      Wow, that's a FAST (and dangerous) spike in backlinks over a short period of time! Definitely blackhat...

      I wouldn't worry about them outranking you for too long, Google is bound to catch up with that kind of backlinking.
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      • Profile picture of the author kimhannah
        Originally Posted by Ettienne View Post

        Wow, that's a FAST (and dangerous) spike in backlinks over a short period of time! Definitely blackhat...

        I wouldn't worry about them outranking you for too long, Google is bound to catch up with that kind of backlinking.
        If you are building a good website with a bunch of useful articles, don't worry. Google will follow you and kick these spammy sites out
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    • Profile picture of the author atwellpub
      Originally Posted by Jammy View Post

      I suspect you are just using the wrong tools to analyse.

      Take a look at whitepaydayloans.org.uk here:
      whitepaydayloans.org.uk - Site Explorer - Ahrefs

      That might answer some of your questions.
      Thank you for bringing attention here, great lesson. Will someone make it a point to see how long this site's rankings last?
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  • Profile picture of the author Ettienne
    With that being said, I've got a keyword I'm ranking for in #2 slot with 56 million competing pages. My competitor in #1 slot has a ONE-PAGE website with 3 stolen texts, now THAT I don't get at all...
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  • Profile picture of the author dmtaylor247
    All of their best links are redirects. They will just buy a few domains spam them and redirect to their m oney site. When Google update they just remove the 301 and repeat, they really don't care they will still be there.
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  • Profile picture of the author LucyLane
    Thanks so much for all your replies - but it's just so frustrating to see all these sites climbing up Google with their black hat tactics and here I am working my butt off trying to steer clear of anything not white hat and I get squat! I know that this might sound dumb, but is there somebody here that can really walk me through what they're doing?

    I get that it's a combination of several things - but how are they doing it and not getting caught or penalized?
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    • Profile picture of the author IMSince2003
      Originally Posted by LucyLane View Post

      I get that it's a combination of several things - but how are they doing it and not getting caught or penalized?
      They ARE being penalized, that's the whole business model. They have churn and burn domains that are filled with scraped junk from everywhere. They build a huge link pyramid and use these small sites as fronts. They know that the site has about 3 weeks to live. So, they slap their affiliate ads up there and make as much money as they possibly can before the slap and they do it all over again. They have database driven scripts that basically take one page of content and seed keywords (like cities, states, zip codes, etc.) and spin them to death and create a site with 1,000,000 pages. Then this super crappy site is the link source for other sites. You need a dedicated server to do this kind of stuff and you also need to know that your IPs will get banned so you need to rotate those out also. Yes, it's a lot of work, but one guy told me he's making 6 figures/month with one site.
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    • Profile picture of the author dmtaylor247
      Originally Posted by LucyLane View Post

      Thanks so much for all your replies - but it's just so frustrating to see all these sites climbing up Google with their black hat tactics and here I am working my butt off trying to steer clear of anything not white hat and I get squat! I know that this might sound dumb, but is there somebody here that can really walk me through what they're doing?

      I get that it's a combination of several things - but how are they doing it and not getting caught or penalized?
      BTH Lucy you are going up against the best blackhatters here, you need to up your blackhat tricks to stand any chance. You won't find any of those sites using whitehat techniques to rank.

      I recently commisioned a 500 page payday loan site and was going to start on it this month but I just can't be bothered with it, instead I'm going in the opposite direction and taking the low hanging fruit in niches people never thought possible. The more competive keywords you go after the more risk you take with Google flattening your site.

      Google will scrutinise any payday loan site they see in great detail, I believe this is one of the main reasons why Google decided to take the action they did recently. A month or so before these updates they deindexed quite a few large payday loan and car insurance websites.

      The people that rank high in Google with these sites have hundreds of thousands of dollars at their disposal and will do anything it takes to rank higher than the next. John the guy from BMR owned and ran quite a few payday loan sites so you can see the level at which they are competing. He had a network of thousands of websites and probably has quite a few left from the Google bannings.

      You just don't need 1 payday site, you need 100's, hosted on 100's of different servers around the world with unique IPs. Then they all need orignal content and high quality backlinks. Plus they will be buying out high quality financial services domains with geniue whitehat links with the keywords "loan" pointing back to them.

      The best thing you can do is build out the site with content and put together a strategy to get some high quality financial related links.
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      • Profile picture of the author LucyLane
        Originally Posted by dmtaylor247 View Post

        BTH Lucy you are going up against the best blackhatters here, you need to up your blackhat tricks to stand any chance. You won't find any of those sites using whitehat techniques to rank.

        I recently commisioned a 500 page payday loan site and was going to start on it this month but I just can't be bothered with it, instead I'm going in the opposite direction and taking the low hanging fruit in niches people never thought possible. The more competive keywords you go after the more risk you take with Google flattening your site.
        So, why did you decide against going for the big keywords? I mean, if you have the contacts, why don't you go after the big bucks? Isn't that more worthwhile? Even if your site only stays up for a couple of days, that's hundreds of thousands of applications.

        How would you recommend getting in touch with these high PR financial sites? How much money are we talking about for each link?

        Now, suppose you had a completely white hat payday site with good domain age, regular influx of traffic, ranking #1 for a couple specific terms, but a lot of keywords at the bottom of page 1, page 2... do you think Google would notice one or two 'paid' links to high PR financial sites so long as they looked natural? Do you think that would be enough to get out of page 2 and bottom of page 1?

        (I'd PM you, but I'm too new )
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        • Profile picture of the author dmtaylor247
          Originally Posted by LucyLane View Post

          How would you recommend getting in touch with these high PR financial sites? How much money are we talking about for each link?
          That's the problem, not many webmasters will give a link to a payday loan site, regardless of whether it's paid or not, for the most part a payday loan's backlink profile is pure spam.

          That's why I decided not to publish the site, considering the changes Google are making ATM I would be playing with fire, I decided it's best to fly under the radar and go for something easier and something I can offer value to the web with.

          All of my previous websites were in the extremely competitive category, I figure if I can compete here then I will dominate smaller niches.

          These sites don't nessesary make the most money, there are smaller less competitive niches that can make just as much.

          Originally Posted by LucyLane View Post

          Do you think Google would notice one or two 'paid' links to high PR financial sites so long as they looked natural? Do you think that would be enough to get out of page 2 and bottom of page 1?
          They probably wouldn't notice but they will probably look through your backlink profile more than other websites. Your best bet with this type of site is just to develop a lot of content and attack long tails with less competition rather than going for the big terms.

          The problem with this niche is - it needs alot of high pagerank links very quickly, it's just not natural, so it will take alot longer to blend in all the different types of links to make it stick. It's more of a long term strategy now than simply blasting out links to your homepage.
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  • Profile picture of the author dp40oz
    The payday loans niche is highly competitive and lucrative. Theres gonna be a ton of cutting edge blackhatters clogging up those SERPs unfortunately.
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