Blackhat SEO guide - your Guide to Google Ranking and SEO Protection

Originally published at Vitsmuni.

Blackhat SEO guide - your Guide to Google Ranking and SEO Protection is your companion to search engine ranking.

Blackhat SEO refers to those techniques which are used to rank in search engines by means of violating the search engine terms and conditions.

In other words blackhat, SEO is a technique to rank in search engines by means of using unethical methods.

“Blackhat” term was originally coined in the westerns movies to distinguish between good guys and bad guys. That’s where the term “Blackhat” and “Whitehat” comes.

Now it is mainly used in the computer world which is referred to hackers or who follows unethical practices.

In this article Blackhat SEO guide - your guide to Google ranking and SEO protection. We will cover the following -

What we cover –

PBN’s

Keyword Stuffing

Paid Links

Social Signal Hacking

Other Blackhat techniques

How blackhat can affect your website

Private Blog Network 

What is a PBN (Private Blog Network)?

A PBN (Private Blog Network) is a collection of high Domain Authority sites. In this, you own the control and all of which that links to your site (also called money site), for which you have paid the money.

Generally, PBN’s are made of expired domains or specifically built for backlink purpose only. The major reasons for building links from PBN is it passes a high level of link equity to your site.

PBN’s are the easiest and shortcut way to build high-quality backlinks in bulk without sweating the tedious activities that typically require for the link building.

Why does SEO include PBN in link building strategy if Google can penalize them?

There is a trade-off of risk whilst using PBN’s. As a part of your SEO strategy, you accept the higher risk of penalty for having better control over your links (quality + content + anchor text).

You must also understand that most SEO strategies include PBNs along with other white hat link strategies.

Also, refraining those PBN sites which have no links and always blending the link building strategy i.e. natural organic backlink whether from outreach program or other means with a mix of PBN links.

Allowing you to tweak you anchor texts, for ranking specific for specific keywords. This is an important part of link building strategies.

Penalty and Deindexation

Building a link from PBN involves a lot of investment and efforts in it. Therefore, we must ensure that the juice we have got must render us benefits for a longer period.

However, due to some reasons for few, it ends up getting penalised and deindexed. Below are the reason and rules for getting deindexed and keeping you as safe a possible.

Reasons for getting Penalty or Deindexation

Buying or selling of the links (Publicly or privately)

Poor content quality (spun/ tweaked content)

Building links from sites having multiple domains on the same IP address

Building links from sites having the same registration info (WhoIs) for multiple domains

Hosting with SEO-hosting companies (many have their IP address range flagged)

Being vocal about owning a PBN (resulting in manual review)

Not allowing the crawler in robots.txt and not at the web server level

Building a link form site which already has been penalised

Not building links from other several useful sites

Not mixing up the right anchor texts in PBN

Eleven rules to keep in mind while building your network of private blogs/websites

• Different Registrars: Make sure you buy domains through different registrars. You should have WhoIs guard enable for all the domains. Nonetheless, we refrain and do not suggest to input fake details in the WhoIs record.

However, if you opt to do so make sure you choose those domains which have not cost you much in acquiring (as you risk the chance of losing the domain). Also, keep in mind to check the DNS of each registrar and avoid using a single name server for all your domains.

• Different Hosting: Every website should be from a different Subnet IP address. If any IP address is being represented as AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD, then make sure that CCC and DDD should be a unique number or identity resembling your website in the network.

Many web hosting providers allow a small range of IP addresses to its client. Whilst the IP address may be different but gets the same as “AAA.BBB.CCC” - in this scenario we suggest you take few domains from this web-hosts.

However, it won’t affect much as the IP addresses are completely unique.

• Content: The content you provide for the PBN site or if you get a link from any existing content published, should be of high quality. You should not have a spun or low-quality content.

You will have to value your money, time and effort for building those backlinks. Which requires your keen interest in your content.

• Link maximum of 2-3 money site from one domain: It’s really tempting to build a link when you invest your money in it. But make sure you don’t get carried away with it. Build a maximum of two to three links from one domain that saves you from the risk of penalty.
• Restrict Site-wide link – Build contextual link, because it looks natural and organic. Building a site-wide link increases the risk of loss of high value to your site and DA when you lose a link from there. Google values more to the textual link.
• Each page has a maximum of 2-5 outgoing links: Each page you built a link should have 2-5 outgoing links, that too from different domains. This is done to ensure that links look natural linking to good authority sites.

Ensuring that all the links that you built should be of your niche, which is very vital.

• Link your domain only when it has sufficient pages created:  You must check the site first before linking to it. The site must have sufficient pages created along with the fresh content updated regularly. Link to good authoritative blog sites.
• Use different anchor text while linking to PBN sites: This solely depends on your existing link profiles. If you have got a diverse link profile, then it is recommended to use specific anchor texts to rank. Nonetheless, if a site is newly created, then you can use a few naked or random anchor text but relevant.
• Every website requires a few pages to pass a manual review: about/contact/privacy policy.
• Build a link to PBN site related to your niche: Build a link related to your niche before the domains expire. Google’s, John Mueller, has clearly stated in a Google webmasters hangout chat that if Google finds that the link to the new website is not same as that of the previous website, then the benefits of the link to the old website does not apply to the new one.

It means that if the link created to the older niche is not the same as a new one, the value of the link will be lost.

• Absolutely NO selling PBN links: and no sharing information with anyone about the domains you own

Here are some things to plan for before you start on this wonderful journey

1. Strategize and decide how many PBN links you need to rank
2. Plan your budget accordingly
3. Prepare a framework or structure of the network that you want to create
4. Plan perfect drip feeding links to your money sites
5. Prepare a proper framework and process to manage it efficiently
6. Analyse and interpret it for your future decision-making process.

Keyword Stuffing 

By definition, keyword stuffing involves overusing the same keywords throughout one page in order to maximize its visibility and organic traffic. Content stuffed with keywords doesn’t look natural and because of this, it’s not user-friendly. 

If you want to use the keyword stuffing for your site to rank for a specific set of keywords. Then make sure that you use the right amount of it.

If you have a site related to blogging like “Fashion” - then make sure that you use the right set of keywords in your content which is well written and designed.

Use-less competitive keywords and use more mid and low competition keywords. Put them in your htag, internal and external links and anchor texts.

Use site like seoprofiler and semrush to check your content quality and keywords optimization before you publish it.

Paid Links 

Paid links are those links which you have received from another site by means of paying money to it.

In other words, links which are not earned but you have paid for it.

Matt Cutts explains it clearly:

 The vast majority of the time things are incredibly clear: people are paying money outright for links based on PageRank, flowing the PageRank, trying to get high the rankings.

He also adds that:

Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s abundantly clear that these are links that are being bought and paid and sold and all that sort of stuff.

Buying links for SEO have some undeniable advantages for the buyer. First of all, it is easy. Once a transaction is done, there is no need to bother with the quality of the content. Secondly, the anchor text, a strong Google ranking factor, is also chosen according to the customer’s preferences.

These two reasons are enough to effectively manipulate search engine rankings which is why this SEO technique is classified as a serious black hat.

Social Signal Hacking 

A social signal is a way to measure social media activities, like votes, shares, engagements. Which a search engine may take this into consideration as a ranking factor.

Also, we look into this deeper this isn’t actually a blackhat SEO technique. This is simply keeping a track record of update what is going on the internet. Understanding the latest trends and persona of social media.

Note: Google doesn’t take social media signals as a ranking factor.

However, here’re some of the tools that you can use for social signal hacking.

Tools to do the same –

Instagram – IconoSquare

Facebook – Toolkit for Facebook Chrome Extension

Pinterest – NinjaPinner

Other tools like Buzzsumo and Brand24.

Other Blackhat techniques

Some other blackhat techniques include:

• Doorway wages
• Content Automation
• Rich Snippet Markup Spam
• Sneaky redirects
• Cloaking
• Reporting a competitor (Negative Seo)
• Pages with malicious behaviour

How blackhat can affect your website?

Blackhat SEO can adversely affect your site and can get deindexed if you get identified. Where there are billions of users on the internet.

Although there are short term success for it if you use the blackhat technique. But for a longer term, it will affect you. We’ve seen this Moz 2.0 update and Google updates as well.

Where the sites DA were drastically reduced. For which there could be many reasons but the main reason included the use of Blackhat technique

Conclusion

Here, are some of the Blackhat SEO techniques and your guide to Blackhat SEO. There's numerous method for you to follow.

You simply need to find some unconventional and conventional channel to leverage your Google ranking.

This SEO guide - Blackhat SEO guide tells you that and takes you how to make it more authenticate.