This document discusses the differences between white hat and black hat SEO tactics. It provides examples of common black hat tactics such as link spamming, cloaking, and buying links. It then shows how those risky black hat tactics can be transformed into stable, long-term white hat strategies like building high-quality content, social media engagement, and comment marketing. The document advocates for using only ethical white hat SEO tactics and explains how they provide better results over the long run compared to manipulative black hat approaches.

1. White Hat vs. Black HatHow to choose between them and transform risky tactics into stable, long term wins Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder, SEOmoz April 2011

2. At SEOmoz, we make SOFTWARE!! We don’t offer any consulting.

3. The Sweet Seduction of Black Hat SEO

4. Weak  http://www.google.com.au/search?q=university+tuition+fees

5. Half these rank because of spammy links. One cloaks  http://www.google.com.au/search?q=compare+mobile+phone+plans

6. Some nasty link manipulation + even redirects in these SERPs http://www.google.com.au/search?q=mens+suits+online

7. These results have a lot of link manipulation in virtually every geography http://www.google.com.au/search?q=car+insurance+companies

8. Bing is better than this in the US (most of the time). Hopefully improved algos will roll out here. http://www.google.com.au/search?q=car+insurance+companies

9. Ugh… To be fair, Google has some junky stuff in their top 10 for this, too. http://www.google.com.au/search?q=car+insurance+companies

10. What Really Makes Me Mad: “You can do blatant, un-adulterated BH and hacking and google doesn't care. Don’t believe me? This blog has been hacked and the links all the way down the bottom are from people who have pushed their backlinks into compromised pre 2.9 wordpress blogs. There are thousands of these blogs out there and you force all of them to accept your backlinks! Instant 1st page position for any keyword. Here is a challenge to the SEOMOZ community – Let’s see if you can get any of the sites in the links down the bottom removed from SERPs by letting Google know. I bet you can't! Here is the link check it out yourself: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421#jtc138625 – here’s the comment

11. WebSpam Sucks Brand marketers, developers and executives see it and presume SEO is just a manipulative dark art. Novice SEOs see it and think “I guess that’s how SEO is done.” Searchers see it and trust Bing + Google less, meaning less opportunity for everyone in search/web marketing. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421 - read this post for more

12. Why Choose White Hat?

13. #1: You’ve Got Nothing to Hide I received more than 30 sites in reply, unfortunately, more than a few weren’t using entirely white hat tactics. Those that were white hat, though, got a link + exposure.

14. #2: No Long-Term Risk Every time Google removes spam from their index, dozens to hundreds of posts appear - http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/label?lid=41234c84d9491af8&hl=en – read some of the horror stories of webmasters and you’ll never want to spam again.

15. #3: Every Action Builds Marketing Value (outside of just SEO) SEO makes up ~35% of SEOmoz’s traffic Links that send traffic are highly likely to be passing SEO value, too. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/traffic-source-diversity-is-essential-for-successful-seo

16. 12 Black Hat Tactics Transformed into Long Term, White Hat Wins

17. #1B: Crappy, Pay-to-List Directories Searching Google or Bing for “SEO Link Directory” brings up lots of these. The smart black hats know which ones will help your site vs. hurt it through testing. New SEOs, sadly, take the brunt of the penalties.

18. #1W: Awesome Resource Lists Just apply some broad keywords, change up the TLD extension, and you can find awesome lists in any sector. Try “edu” / “org” as the site modifiers, or terms like “links,” “directory,” “world wide web,” or “suggested sites” (get creative, too – this list can help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/long-list-of-link-searches

19. #2B: Email Requests to Rent Links James probably should have checked out the site a bit more; the sidebar notes that this particular blogger is married to me 

20. #2W: Email Offers to Create Content Starting with connections and reciprocation on social media is a great way to build a relationship prior to requesting content contribution. It’s more likely to get a yes, too.

21. #3B: Sponsored Wordpress Theme Links Tragically, despite Wordpress’ efforts to kill sponsored themes, they persist in all shapes and forms. This blog post explains: http://angelanatcus.com/sponsor-a-wordpress-theme-and-drive-traffic-to-your-site/

22. #3W: Useful WordpressPlugins You don’t even need to build something necessarily relevant to your site! If you just contribute a useful plugin, you will earn authentic links from folks who appreciate it.

23. #4B: Fake Twitter Accounts to Tweet/RT Links That’s Bob Rains, a former black hat and crazy smart SEO. He explained on a panel in Munich how fake Twitter accounts brought value. I think he could have done even better with white hat ones 

24. #4W: Build Highly Followed, Real Twitter Accounts Business.com built this account for one of their many blogs by sharing good, relevant updates on the topic. Now it’s got 14K+ followers and can powerfully influence traffic to their own site, too.

25. #5B: Sitewide Footer Links When I was in Italy, I noticed that many, many sites there seem to like the sitewide footers with anchor text as a linking tactic. Unfortunately, these are often devalued.

26. #5W: Sitewide Links to a Partner Page Instead of a direct link without much context, we link to a page explaining our relationship and why we’re endorsing this company. We’ve done this in the past with all our partnerships, and CTR is often higher!

27. #6B: Cloaking Text on a Page This comes via Matt Cutts’ blog. It’s pretty hard to find cloaked text this basic in Google’s index anymore, though more “sophisticated” stuff still appears on occasion.

28. #6W: Make that Content Visible in a CSS Tab The left/right arrows and top menu control which content to display, but it’s by no means “hidden” or “cloaked.” Via the Moz Features Page: http://www.seomoz.org/features

29. #7B: Reciprocal Link Pages C’mon! Seriously?! Who actually still calls their reciprocal link page “link-partners.htm?” Luckily, from what I bothered to check, not many of these seem to be doing well because of it. And who knows? Maybe limo sites just make lots of friends.

30. #7W: Give + Receive Testimonials Make sure to send a testimonial that follows this rule, includes your full name, title, link and a photo. Testimonial rule via the always excellent and greatly missed Kathy Sierra: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/02/rethinking_test.html

31. #8B: Automated Link Drop Spam When you see links like this, then search for those keywords and see the target websites rank it’s the worst feeling. No way to know for sure if these are the links that are putting them there, but it bums white hats out every time.

32. #8W: Authentic Comment Marketing A comment on Mark Suster’s blog led to a post, links + tweets from him, and an in-person breakfast in Los Angeles. It’s a perfect example of how authentic web marketing wins more than just SEO.

33. #9B: Falsified Facebook “Like” Buttons Some nefarious black hats will make the Facebook “like” button trigger from clicks on other parts of the page. Watch your status bar to be sure of what you’re clicking when browsing sketchy portions of the web. Line of text

34. #9W: Earn Shares! They Can’t Be Gamed, But They’re Way More Powerful Screenshot from http://unbounce.com/blog/ which just rocks in general and should be read by every organic web marketer.

35. Correlation of Social Media-Based Factors(data via Topsy API & Google Buzz API) Amazing: Facebook Shares is our single highest correlated metric with higher Google rankings. Although voters thought Twitter data / tweets to URLs were more influential, Facebook’s metrics are substantially better correlated with rankings. Time to get more FB Shares! http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html

36. #10B: Article “Spinning” “Spinning” is where sites re-write a single piece of content using software or low cost writers dozens-hundreds of times and publish all over the web to get links or visits.

37. #10W: Content Syndication Because we syndicate our full content RSS feed with absolute links (not relative) back to our site, we benefit from dozens of re-publishers of our work with every post! The creative commons licensing system can work very well for some folks http://creativecommons.org/choose/– or you can create your own license rules.

38. #11B: Cloaking for Search Bots UMMM… I CAN TOTALLY SEE YOU THERE DUDE. I don’t understand why anyone even does this anymore. It’s such a high risk, low return behavior, and it’s so rare that there’s value in showing different content to bots vs. users.

39. #11W: Use Cookies/Logins to Show Varied Content Based on Behavior Amazon knows a lot about me, so they can give me a richer experience when I visit Always make sure that the default, search visitor, non-logged-in experience matches what search engines see, or you could still fall foul of cloaking guidelines.

40. #12B: Using Link Brokers

41. #12B: Costs of “Buying” Links 40 Link Rental Sources (relatively few) Average Price of $300/month (that’s low, BTW) $300 * 40 * 12 = $144,000/year What else could I do with that money?

42. #12W: Hire a Director of Inbound Marketing Writes awesome, link-worthy blog posts Guest posts for Unbounce on other sites Builds gorgeous infographics that spread Answers questions on Q+A sites Has built a Twitter account w/ 20K+ followers Runs their FB page w/ 4K+ fans Just today, he created an eBook of an article using Themeforest + other tools and then blogged about how anyone can do it: http://unbounce.com/social-media/how-i-created-a-viral-ebook-landing-page-for-8-using-themeforest-paywithatweet-kissinsights-and-unbounce/

43. We need to stop pretending that black hat is OK. It hurts our entire industry’s opportunity, and it’s a lazy, short-term approach to building a business on the web.

45. Blog: www.seomoz.org/blog

46. Email: rand@seomoz.orgYou can now try SEOmoz PRO Free! http://www.seomoz.org/freetrial