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I always get a kick out of reading google’s recomended guidelines. They make stupid moronic statements like, would you be ashamed to explain to a competitor what sort of SEO tactics you are using. Me personally no, only reason why i would not like to explain to competitor my tactic because maybe he steal them and then use them for himself. I personally find this who blackhat / whitehat seo crap rather comical. But I guess i must be a blackhat , I never stuck the label on myself, others have.

Often I think that I must live in a hole, totally isolated away from the rest of the world. Recently one of my wife’s relatives came back from the USA to visit PH. While he was visiting it came up that both of us where into e-commerce (I am not sure what proper term is when u sell stuff on net as affiliate). Anyway we started to have a little chat. He then told me he was buying traffic using PPC. Perplexed I asked him why don’t you just rank your site ? He replied that takes time, not really I told him, you can probably do it in a week. He looked at me kinda funny. I then proceeded to explain to him what I would do. He then grins and tells me “That’s blackhat”. Irronically it never dawned onto me, until that point.

Anyway people always ask me what does it take to be a good blackhat. They seem to think that being a good blackhat just involves know a bunch of tricks / secrets . Or they seem to think that blackhats are extemely good coders. There also is this idea going arround that to be a blackhat you have to be extremely intelligent.

All of those things help, I will not deny that. Yes I have learned a few tricks about search engines, but all the information that is required on how to rank is publicly available. Anyone can find countless papers on Trustrank Pagerank etc. Probably because of my experience I am a better coder then most programmers, but then again I know better blackhats then me, who are not as good of coders :). As for the intelligence part, well lets just say I have a below average IQ :).

So what makes does it take to make a blackhat ?

Blackhat is a state of mind.

You know that yes google,yahoo and msn have the smartest, brightest PHDs working for them. And these eggheads have all virtually unlimited resource, and despite that you know you can beat them at thier own game, on thier playing field. Despite all the odds against you, you manage to succeed.

When you look at something on the net, immediately in your head, a little light flashes on, and you think how can i use that to rank higher in google.

Where other people tell you it is impossible, you do not get upset. You just look at them and wonder what in the world do they mean. For in the blackhat’s vocabulary, that word does not exist.

Other people may think that some canned tool they buy of the net makes them a blackhat. Or maybe hanging arround syndk8 makes them a blackhat, but no.

When I first started doing blackhat I made my own content generation system, very similar to rssgm . I was doing the standard spin X ammount of sites a day, get them all indexed, traffic comes, and then inevitably they would get banned. I would repeat this cycle over and over again. To monentize the sites I would either use adsense, or some adult sponsor, depending on the type of site I generated.

I was one day listening to a CD on marketing. It stated something allong the lines that the most expensive accusition a buisness makes is getting the customer throught the door. If the product they sell costs like $1 they often will spend $5 to get the customer in the store. The examples he used where the soft drink industry etc.

As ussually it takes a while for me to clue in. In this case like 6 months. Initially with my adult traffic I was either sending the user right to the signup page, or to a page full of banners. I would convert at maybe 1:1200.

But then I decided to make attractive looking adult blogs. Initially when I opened them, I was getting traffic, but no conversions. WTF, I should be converting at higher rate no ? All this effort gone to waste. For 2 weeks traffic but no conversion. Then all of a sudden bam 4 signups in 1 day :). When i looked at the signups, they came from bookmark. I notice most of my signups come from bookmarks now. What is happening is that the users see blogs. Because they are quality blogs they keep coming back, eventually they will buy.

So when you make MFA(made for adsense) sites, initially you are making profit on short term, but on longterm you are throwing away your money.

When I origionally started doing SEO i thought that increasing traffic would increase revenue. This is a mistake that everyone seems to make. There is the myth that increased traffic increases revenues.

Lets say you site sells XXXX.

Conventional wisdom saids that you should rank in top 10 for XXXX and you will get most sales.

But reality is you are better off to target for keywords like :

buy XXXX online

purchase XXXX online

You will get far less traffic per day when you target like that.

But on the other hand the guys who come to your site are ready to buy. If you have a good product with good landing pages you can get 1:10 conversion ratio. The key is targeting your traffic, the closer the traffic is to what your page offers, the easier it is to make a sale.

UnitedCrown of synk8 told me he was using Wordpress to develop his static sites. Initially I thought that was the stupidist fuking idea I ever heard of. I am planning to move into WhiteHat(WH) sites, when users have more then a landing page, things like quality content, a visually pleasing site are important.

As a result I have hired a writer to create a site for me. I then planed to hire a web designer to layout the site for me. But fuking webdesigner do too many drugs, and are flaky and unreliable. Instead I plan to get my write to write directly into wordpress.

Wordpress very flexible and has tons for free themes and plugins :).

Anyway I am very intrested to see how this will turn out.