Black Hat SEO has become part in many webmasters’ SEO strategies. Unlike stated on blogs and boards of self-acclaimed SEO gurus there is no clear-cut borderline between white hat and black hat SEO anymore. Adding a little bit of the other side is not so bad after all according to theories about Markov Chain, an important metric in statistical mathematics. Markov chain more or less translates to a certain amount of links in a chain of connections will be sick or obsolete and search engines accept this rule of nature. Actually, it’s suspected to be part of Google’s algorithm. A threshold for ‘sick’ connections is somewhere close to 20% and there is a possibility for a generous margin added on top.
This means, if you are a super clean white hat and your SEO strategy is 98% straight you are most likely going to be falling behind. Your profile might look artificially built according to assumptions of unnatural growth. Don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying you should turn to black hat tactics. Most likely they are going to hurt you if done in a spammy way, but they could help building natural linking profiles and control branding.
Small Steps do the trick
Ok, first of all, the most beneficial effect can be achieved by equally weighting your popularity. Have organic links and supplement them by 20% of artificial growth. Nobody will notice and it might bump you up a couple of notches. Not a big step, but your sites will stand on a wider foundation.
Caveat of Black Hat Addiction
If over shooting this objective and most of your inbound links are coming from questionable sources all will backfire and people will show contempt. Being a black hat may lead to being regarded as an asshat. Taking benefits away from your competition is one aspect of black hatters For example BHs could go to Wikipedia and become an editor to erase competitors’ links from their site. Same can be done by becoming an category editor for DMOZ blocking the road for others. More small minded one can report abuse of web2 properties that are used by others and wait for them to become available again. This way you get your competition to link to you – in most cases they won’t even recognize. Bingo. As you see, engaging in black hat strategies causes trouble. One needs to answer one question: Is all this trouble and work worth all efforts or would it be better spend on ethical link building?! The truth lies somewhere in the middle. If you know how to use black hat techniques in a reasonable way, chances are it will benefit your domain park. Otherwise it will be a waste of time and effort imho.
