What is meant by Blackhat SEO?

If you are not familiar, there are generally thought to be 2 schools of SEO work--whitehat and blackhat. I am a Whitehat guy--meaning I don't do too many risky things, and I try to follow the established "rules" of SEO. So what is blackhat, and why would someone do it?

It's all about the Benjamins
Blackhat SEO is done for one of 2 reasons--the first (which is rare) is purely for malice. Much like some people like to create viruses and things that simply clog up or destroy machines, some blackhatters just like to throw a wrench in the system. Again, this is likely pretty rare, but I can't help but believe it to be true.

But much more common, is to use some risky techniques to get LOTS of traffic fast--and try to capitalize on it. Web work is all about traffic, and conversions are essentially a numbers game--throw enough people into a site, and sooner or later, some are going to click through an ad...and each click means $$$ to the site owner. So in a nutshell, blackhat SEO is about making money off traffic--typically, by any means necessary. So a blackhatter is going to try to figure out the loopholes that allow them to drive huge numbers of visits quickly, and they work the numbers to their financial advantage and then move on--preferably before getting caught. Stick and move, stick and move.

What do they do?
I can't by any means claim to be an expert, but I have studied some blackhat techniques. What I have seen, more than not, is that it is about writing clever scripts that quickly do something that would otherwise take a long time to accomplish. If blog comments are a good tactic for SEO (which they can be), a blackhatter will write a script that auto-finds and auto-populates as many blog comments as possible. Each comment has a link back to the main site, so run it a few nights in a row, and bingo--you have lots and lots of backlinks without ever really visiting a single blog.

Or, let's say that blogs themselves are the ticket to happiness. A good blackhat will create a script that creates and populates many blogs, so by running this a few times, they suddenly have many many web properties out there linking to the real site they want to promote. The content is obviously auto-generated, as it rarely makes sense--think of a spam email, and just make it larger, and more complex. To give you a sample, I just went out and found this little gem on some crappy auto-gen blog: "My study is Rolando and I am today 1 meg proportionality earnest most this change gifting possibleness that I am fortuitous sufficiency to hit been offered. I chose my intellect sagely and am today sight my dreams become to fruition. "

I hope you too, sight your dreams become to fruition.

But this must work sometimes--enough people do it to make me think that it is the monkey and the typewriter kind of thing going on here. Seems like a really sleazy way to make money to me though...

What's wrong with making money?
Nothing is wrong with making money off SEO work. Frankly, I don't have any real problem with blackhat stuff (though the example above does show why I dislike some of their web-clogging tactics)--but I simply won't do it, because it is risky. What's the risk? Being penalized by the search engines...usually, having the sites in question removed permanently from the index.

Black hatters are some of the smartest people on the web, and always have been--they can code circles around most of us (and they do). But they lose sites as often as they gain them, which is why they continually change tactics, and look for new loopholes to sneak into. To me, that is simply too time consuming to even consider an option.

Conclusion
Ultimately, even if you are a whitehat SEO writer, I have found it is smart to learn what you can about blackhat techniques. You don't have to do it, but you should study it, and understand why some of their techniques work. Why? Because you might be able to change it and gain some valuable headway. Besides, these are the guys and gals you will be competing with, so you'd better know what they are up to. Some people consider themselves "greyhats" or whatever--I don't mince words like that. Either you follow all the rules or you take risks...the levels of risk you take color you accordingly.

In the end, blackhat is not illegal. It is simply a game of risk--how much risk are you willing to take to find success? Whitehat techniques will very rarely get you penalized, if ever. Not so for blackhat--if you get pinched for spamming the web, it can have a cascading effect on every site you manage, both now and in the future. The best blackhats have to be very secretive, because if they are identified, they will be lucky to ever get a site to rank again. So they have to hide, and protect their efforts with secrecy and misdirection.

I personally don't like doing things that way. I like being transparent, and above board all the time. It makes it much easier on me, and offers a longer success rate to my clients. But if you are willing to take high risks, there is certainly a lot of money to be made off of mastering the right blackhat techniques.

It is a pretty elite club though--you have to be an extremely good coder, and you have to have a mind that is one step ahead of the pack all the time. Personally, I have a lot of respect for the blackhats...but it stops there. I will study and learn whatever I can from them, but when it comes to risk, SEO work is not where I want to go out on a limb--it is simply not worth it to me. Besides, I like writing--not coding. I want to be able to add something of value to the web, not just cash in. Big difference in approach there.

Hate to say it like this, but essentially my hat's off to anyone finding success on the web.