Have you been referred by your SEO consultant to try gray hat SEO
techniques to rank your site (page) quickly on the search engines for
most competitive keywords in your niche? If you haven’t, I am going to
tell you why you should try Gray Hat SEO tactics for ranking your site
better and quicker!
I have been spending a lot of time
crafting out helpful articles around search engine optimization (SEO),
and so far, I have come across a lot of handy (free) ways to perform
keyword research as well as how to optimize your site/blog to ensure
you’ll be actually be found on the Internet.
Before explaining
what gray hat SEO technique is and how you can benefit implementing on
your site, let me cover some important point for you today. Over the
past several month, I have been crafting topics that basically hovers
around search engine optimization (SEO), which I think, is the most
important aspect that you need to take care of before you even set up a
site/blog.
Search engine optimization involves many sub-steps,
which include niche market research, finding profitable keywords to
target for that market (keyword research), and performing a thorough
competitive analysis of those keywords to ensure you’ll actually get
high ROI in terms of rankings and driving “targeted”
traffic to your site, no matter which niche you’re in).
Once
you have found right set of keywords to target and optimized your site
and sales page(s) around it, you can now begin to market your site using
three methods – by following a) black hat SEO tactics b) white hat SEO
tactics and c) gray hat SEO techniques.
Before I explain what is
gray hat techniques (as the topic is around gray hat, not others), let
me explain what black hat and white hat SEO tactics are.
Related article: How Not To Do SEO
Black hat SEO tactics
– Black hat SEO tactics will get your site banned from Google search
engines because all the SEO tricks, tips, and methods you follow are
against their guidelines.
Since Google and other major search
engines wants to offer the best search results for their users, they’re
constantly rolling out new search engine algorithm that filters out
“genuine” site from the bad ones.
White hat SEO tactics –
White hat SEO tactics is the “legitimate” ways to ranking your site on
search engines. You actually do most of the SEO manually to ensure that
you’re not using any automated tools to generate content on your site,
or get Facebook likes, blog comments, and other backlink generating
tactics. Everything is done slowly and naturally so that nothing appears
unnatural in white hat SEO tactics. As a result, Google will love your
site over others and
rank it accordingly.
Now, let’s talk about the focus of today’s topic – i.e. gray hat SEO?
What is Gray Hat SEO tactic?
According
John Andrews, a SEO Consultant, “Gray Hat SEO isn’t something that sits
between White Hat and Black Hat SEO, but they’re rather ‘SEO tactics
that aren’t well-defined by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo,
and Bing.’
“Most people will likely disagree how these tactics
could either support or contradict to the published guidelines of
Google,” continues Andrews.
Why Gray Hat SEO techniques are important for your site?
Although Gray Hat SEO is a risky business, nonetheless, it’s more beneficial than your normal White Hat SEO tactics.
Gray
Hat SEO examples include buying link from external sources such as
article submission sites, forums, social media sites (Facebook, Twitter,
Pinterest, YouTube, etc). The risky part here is that Google doesn’t
approve of any party participating in “link” building schemes.
Of
course, when you start to get loads of, thousands of, backlinks from
high PR blogs, forum, and sites in you niche, no wonder your site will
start to get immediate rankings for keywords you have used for the Gray
Hat SEO tactic.
If you want to get quick rankings by getting high
PR backlinks to your site and have plenty of budget, thousands of
dollars to spare, we highly suggest that you sign up for Gray Hat SEO as
the return for your investment is huge.
Yes, you’ll
get likes
from real people on your Facebook page, drop relevant and natural
comments on high PR blog/site(s) around your niche and bring flood of
relevant traffic to your site.
Related article: Top 7 SEO Best Practices for 2015
Gray Hat SEO Examples
Here are some of the examples of Gray Hat SEO strategy that most internet/affiliate marketers use:
#1: Social Media Buys to Drive Traffic
Do you know that there are software tools that will allow your brand to get thousands of
followers
on your social media profile within 2-3 days, automatically? For
example, many SEO companies use mass friend requests to get small
business owners around 20-30,000 followers on their Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ profiles.
While
this Gray Hat SEO tactics seems to generate high ROI in lesser time
than White Hat SEO, it’s definitely against the Google SEO guidelines.
Fortunately,
Google has remained silent about these tactics, but that doesn’t mean
you’re not playing games with them. You could be banned or penalized in
the future, if not now!
#2: Paying for Site/Blog Review
If
you’re not a very popular company, or just starting out, hiring someone
to write an honest reviews about your brand and services is definitely
get you noticed
online. Plus,
search engine robot haven’t the sophisticated intelligence of a human,
and hence, won’t be able to crack it down. Is it scam or not? But
nonetheless, paying for site/blog reviews is still considered a little
bit shady.
#3: Paying for bookmarking services
A lot
of small businesses are paying for bookmarking services and Google
hasn’t said anything about it yet. That means, although paying for
getting link back to your site is unauthorized by Google, nothing has
been done to weed out site that uses bookmarking services to promote
their brand and services.
If you’re thinking about getting more
exposure to your site, you can pay for people to suggest your links to
their connections on social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon,
LinkedIn, Reddit, among others.
Or if you’re like me, you can
quietly create multiple accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and
other social bookmarking sites and promote your products and services.
There are software tools that automate social bookmarking sites, too.
Social
media sites may ban you, but Google won’t, and we think it’s one of the
best Gray Hat SEO tactic you can employ to promote your site, quickly
and easily.
#4: Spinning content
In addition to buying reviews, Facebook and Twitter followers,
you also need to offer something of value useful to your targeted users
in several places like article submission directories, forums, and
blogs in your niche.
A lot of people are using
duplicate
content to promote their brand and services. They’re using tools such
as The Best Spinners that gathers content, and even suggests, from
various sources around a specific topics, spins it, and create a 100%
original “fake” content.
Spinning content is definitely considered
a Gray Hat SEO tactic as the content isn’t detected by search engine
robots if they’re fake or original. For example, a lot of people use PLR
content they spread around the Internet to generate a free backlink to
their site, which is considered to be a Gray Hat SEO tactic.
Well,
we think, any method that creates spun content is likely be on the gray
zone. The White Hat SEO tactic would be to craft an original article,
even if its means sitting behind the desk for an hour and bleeding your
fingers, or simply paying a professional writer to churn out blog
articles for online marketing.
#5: Creating micro-sites for each niche
Micro
sites are small sites that are creating focusing on very specific set
of keywords, which we think isn’t a Gray Hat SEO tactic.
However,
if you go on creating 10-20 micro site, or “micro niche sites,” for
every keyword you want to target and then point back to your original
site, it may definitely a Gray Hat technique.
Although there’s
nothing bad about creating highly targeted niche sites, you must be
aware of the search engine spiders might consider it gray hat.
Related article: Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid In 2015
So, should you consider using Gray Hat SEO tactics for your site?
Well, we think Gray Hat tactics isn’t that bad at all to rank
your site higher in search engines. Google for “Gray Hat services” and
you’ll find SEO companies advertising Gray Hat SEO techniques as their
services. You may employ Gray Hat SEO tactics on your site, but at your
own risk because you never know when you might get “slapped” by Google
during its next update.
What’s Gray Hat SEO now can become a Black
Hat as soon as another Penguin and Panda update rolls in which often
does, every year.
So for a time being, if you want to get high ROI
with less effort, time, and make everything automated, you can use Gray
Hat SEO tactics, but search engines still don’t like it.
You
won’t gain a lot by staying on the bad side of Google, but being
creative in your marketing campaigns is always a good idea. So what
should you do, I hear you ask.
We highly recommend that you do not
stick exclusively to White Hat SEO tactics. You’ll have to spend a lot
of time, energy, and resources to get high ROI from White Hat SEO
tactics alone. However, if you want to get quick results, I would
recommend you employ White Hat automation tactic in your SEO campaigns.
Although
automation is considered as Black Hat by Google, but there is a thing
such as White Hat automation, which could be another term for Gray Hat
SEO tactic.
So you see, if you want to stay competitive in your
niche without investing a lot of time and money, White Hat automation
are the best option you have on your side.
There are several
software tools such that were created with Google’s guideline in mind,
but also utilizes some automation tasks to improve quality, and decrease
cost and time.
These tools include:
- Google
Keyword Planner Tool: With this free SEO keyword suggestion tool, you
can get relevant keywords with their search volume, competition, and
cost estimates for ad copies. I usually use Google Keyword Planner tool.
- Keyword Discovery Tool (WordStream):
- The Best Spinner
Whether
you’re are researching to get relevant keywords for your niche site, or
crafting out keyword-rich sales copy, blog articles, or ad copy, you
are always following Google’s guidelines.