Note from Editor: Please treat anything associated with “black hat” with caution 🙂
So you are intrigued by black hat SEO, just to scared to try it? Good, the only thing you will experience is pain.
But, there is another way to get black hat SEO to benefit your site while protecting it from the Google ban stick. As you already know, there is a real problem with content being stolen and used around the Web. It infuriates most site owners, but it makes me very happy 😉
So, let’s set a little trap for the black hatters and watch as links come pouring into our site.
Black Hat Content
Black hat SEO has many faces and has become as complex and challenging as white hat SEO. Most black hatters spend most of their time focused on link building and figuring out ways to game the system. They are not natural content creators.
Actually, creating content is the bane of most black hatter’s existence. So they steal it from all types of sources. The smart ones know where to find content that has not been indexed, like sites that do not take advantage of ping. You are not one of those webmasters, right?
You, on the other hand, have one very unique advantage over black hatters, you love to create good content. Content that is legible and popular. Content that is loved by the search engines and regularly indexed.
Even if you use ping, when black hatters steal your content they are betting on their domain and link authority to push their page above your page in the SERPS. If it doesn’t work, oh well, your page of content is only one of thousands that they have automatically scraped and stolen.
Black Hat Automation
Black hat SEO is about one thing, automation. They look for ways to automate their processes. The more automated processes they employ that is successful, the more successful they are.
To scrape content, a black hatter needs a page related to that information to scrape. They have to be able to automatically locate that content through other sources.
RSS feeds make it extremely easy to steal content, since it is in standard format for RSS readers.
Here is how the process goes down typically:
- Black hatter builds site own specific niche, like “Digital Cameras”
- He scrapes the Google Blog search for the most recent posts related to “Digital Cameras”
- He scrapes the sites featured in the blog search and steals the content, posting it to his WordPress blog
- He automatically gathers inbound links to these pages at a heavy rate, usually from a large link network that he has set up, scraping content to do so.
- He repeats the process over and over again until Google finally bans his domain and hopefully has made his money from the affiliate or ads on his site
Black hatters hopes they can overcome white hat sites with sheer volume of links and content. If it didn’t work, there would not be so many black hat SEO’s.
Backlink Placement
The key to making your stolen content work for you is to include back links in your post to your site. This can be manual links or related posts at the end of your post. Most black hat SEOs do not remove the links inside of a post. It is less likely that they will be reported for spamming if they leave the links intact.
Plus, removing the links requires more processing time and is not in their best interest to do so. This leaves you with a great inbound link opportunity.
Using a plugin like RSS footer gives you the ability to add a link to your original post and a link to your home page with your chosen anchor text. Both of these tactics are extremely effective. Linking to the original post insures that your post will always outrank the content the black hatter has stolen.
Getting your content stolen
It is a good idea to provide a full version of your post in your RSS feed if you are using RSS footer. This makes your site easier to scrape. The more times your site is scraped and your content is stolen, the more backlinks you will acquire.
Make sure you can get to your feed by going to /feed/. If you can’t, add a 301 redirect to your site sending visitors and scrapers to your true feed location.
Promote your RSS feed to as many aggregators as possible. Every time you publish a new post, you want the content scrapers to grab your page and post it on their site.
Make sure to ping Google blog as this is one of the favorite places to find new content sources for many black hatters. Ping everyone, everywhere.
Advanced Technique
Alright, this technique is slightly gray hat. You have been warned.
You need to create a script that monitors what is hot in the online universe. You can pull the Twitter hot feed or any other social media tracking stats.
You can bet that if something goes hot on Twitter or other social media outlets, black hatters are moving rapidly to capture whatever search traffic they can. What do the black hatters need? That’s right, your content.
So, we want to trick them into linking to your content over and over again. Here is what you do:
- Create a script that monitors what’s hot
- Create a pinging script to ping blog aggregators (I would leave Google out)
- Create a scraper to grab generic post titles from a blog aggregator
- Once you have those three scripts, you combine them into one script that looks at what is hot, creates random post titles, adds your post with internal links, and pings blog aggregators.
So, you ping the same post with the same links back to your main page over and over again with a different title. Make sure to include a canonical URL in the head section of your page in case Google finds the page.
Your site on Digital Cameras republishes the same content over and over again under a different title and slightly different URL. The black hatters are monitoring the same social media telling them what is hot. Their script detects from one of the blog aggregators that your site has a recent post on the subject based on the title.
They grab your content and post it on their site. While all the black hatters fight to rank for the topic, you sit back and collect as many links as you want.
You could literally gather thousands of links in a very short period of time. Remember, you don’t want to overdo this technique. But if you are stuck a few pages back, you may want to give it a try.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
How To Trick Black Hatters Into Building Links To Your Site
