Black Hat SEO

What we should avoid –

1. PBN’s
2. Keyword Stuffing
3. Paid Links
4. Social Signal Hacking

1. Private Blog Network 

What is a PBN (Private Blog Network)?

A PBN is a collection of high authority websites that you have complete control over and all of which link back to your money site.

Typically PBNs are made of expired domains that have great backlinks and therefore pass high levels of link equity to your money site

PBNs are a shortcut method to get high-quality backlinks in large quantities without having to perform the tedious tasks typically done for link building.

Why do SEOs use PBNs as a link building strategy if Google can penalize them

There is a trade-off when using PBNs. As an SEO you accept the higher risk of a penalty for a better chance at controlling the links (quality + content + anchor text).

You should also note that most SEOs use PBNs along with other white hat link building strategies. They never use PBNs on sites that have no links and always try and have a mix of backlinks i.e. natural organic backlinks from outreach as well as PBN links. PBN links let them tweak the anchor text to ensure that the sites rank for specific keywords.

Penalty and Deindexation

Building a PBN takes a lot of money and a lot of effort. You, therefore, want to treat this as a prized asset and want to build it to last for many more years to come. Below are reasons why PBNs get deindexed as well as rules that you should follow to ensure that you keep your PBNs as safe as possible.

Ten Reasons for Penalty or Deindexation

• Selling links (publicly or privately)
• Poor content quality (spun content) that results in a manual review
• Hosting multiple domains on the same IP address
• 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)
• Blocking crawlers in robots.txt and not at the web server level
• Using a domain that already had a penalty
• Not linking out to other useful websites
• Not mixing up Anchor texts in links from PBN

Eleven rules for building your network of private blogs/websites

1. Different Registrars: Try and buy domains through different registrars. You should have the WhoIs Guard enabled on most domains. We do not suggest having fake details in the WhoIs records. However, if you must, do this for domains that have not cost you a lot to acquire (since you run the risk of losing the domain). Also, make sure to use the DNS of the individual registrar and not use one single name server for all your domains.

2. Different Hosting: Each website should be on a different Subnet IP address. If an IP address is represented as AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD, then the CCC and DDD should be unique for each of the websites in the network. Many web hosts only get a small range of IP addresses that they can provide to a client. While the IP address might be different, you may get the same “AAA.BBB.CCC” – in this case, only host one or two domains with this web-host.

3. Content: You should have unique and valuable content on each of the websites. There should be no spun content whatsoever. Treat the domains in your PBN with the same respect as you treat your money site and invest in their quality.

4. Each domain will link out to any money site once only. No matter how tempting it is to link out to all your money sites through a single domain, remember that this only increases the risk.

5. There should be no site-wide links – only links that are embedded in the contextual text. We strongly believe that in the future all non-contextual links are going to be devalued.

6. Each page has a maximum of 2-5 outgoing links.  Some pages should also have no links at all. This is done to keep the link profile natural. All outbound links from a single page should go to authority sites that are relevant to your niche.  Linking out to other useful sites in your niche is very important.

7. Each domain should start to link out to your money site only after it has got a few pages created. The initial links should all be to other authoritative sites in your niche. Don’t simply link out to Wikipedia, Youtube, and other big sites. Choose authoritative sites in your niche.

8. Use different anchor texts when linking to your money site. This will depend on your current link profile. If you have a diverse link profile, then it’s fine to use specific anchor texts to rank. However, if your site is brand new, use a few naked URL anchor texts as well.

9. Each website needs certain pages to pass manual review – about/contact/privacy policy.

10. Your PBN site should be in the same niche as it was before the domain had expired. Google’s John Mueller has clearly said in a Google webmasters hangout that if Google realizes that the new website is not the same as the previous website, then the link to the old website does not apply to the new one. Basically, if you don’t stay within the same niche, the back links will lose all value.

11. 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. Plan for how many PBN links you need to rank
2. Plan for how much doing this will cost you
3. Plan for the way you will structure your network
4. Plan for drip feeding links to your money sites
5. Plan for managing things efficiently

2. 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 were to do keyword stuffing use a site like writeraccess.com to get a bunch of content written for you for cheap and then load your main keywords into a tool like LSI graph and get all of the variations of keywords and stuff them into your different h tags, bold and italics, and internal / external links. After, use a site like seoprofiler.com to check for over optimization via keyword density to content ratio.

Paid Links 

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 has 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 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.

4. Social Signal Hacking

Although this isn’t completely black hat, social media can be heavily abused. Social signals are obviously a ranking factor these days and there

are some seriously crazy methods you can use to hack your social signals.

Tools to do the same –

Instagram – IconoSquare

Facebook – Toolkit for Facebook Chrome Extension

Pinterest – NinjaPinner