Confessions of a Retired Black Hat SEO: 7 Crazy Tactics That Yielded Big Gains

When I started off my career in SEO, I was 16 years old. And, just like most 16 year olds, I didn’t worry much about “consequences.”  In my fairytale world, they didn’t really exist.

We all learn to know better as we age, but you have to keep in mind that I was naive. When I started off my journey into the world of SEO, I didn’t worry about Google’s rules… I just did whatever I wanted.

If you fast forward to today, I don’t leverage or practice black hat techniques and if I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t have dabbled in the art of the dark side. Why?Because if I spent all of that time and energy on legitimate tactics, I would have created a much larger long-term business.

I won’t bore you with the reasons why you should avoid black hat SEO, as you already know them. Instead, I’m going to share with you 7 crazy tactics (with data) that I leveraged as a kid.

You’ll quickly see that I was a really creative kid… and it’s one of the main reasons I do well as a marketer today.

Crazy Tactic #1: TwitThis

What’s one thing that every blog has? Well, of course, every blog has content… but they also have social sharing buttons.

From Facebook, to Twitter and even LinkedIn… you see these social sharing buttons everywhere. But, that wasn’t always the case.

When Twitter first came out, they didn’t have “tweet” buttons. Heck, people weren’t even calling them “tweets.”

So, my team and I created our own Twitter sharing buttons that people could embed into their websites. We called these Twitter sharing buttons: TwitThis (you can see what the original site looked like below)

How did it do?  Well, so many people started to embed TwitThis buttons on their site that it caused the website to once have a Google PageRank of 8 and over 54 million backlinks.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the site peaked at 54 million backlinks from 45,000 unique domains. But. what’s more impressive is the backlink profile.

Just look at the image above, you’ll see that the site had 27 .gov and 123 .edu backlinks.

That’s not too shabby… all from just creating a free tool that allowed people to place “tweet” buttons on their site.

The way that I spread the word about it was really interesting. I just went on Twitter, found all of the popular sites leveraging it and I emailed the webmasters something like this:

Hey John,

I noticed that CNN has been leveraging Twitter lately. Have you thought about asking your users to share your content on Twitter so you can get even more traffic?

We actually created a free tool called TwitThis that makes this whole process easy. We provide you with a simple code that you can paste into your HTML so that your website readers can easily share your content on Twitter, which will help CNN get more traffic.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Neil

Once I built TwitThis up to a high domain authority site, I was then able to create sub pages that would contain content around many of the popular terms out there and they would naturally rank high, as the site had so much domain authority.

Crazy Tactic #2: Battlefield Bypass

I know what you are thinking… “what the heck is battlefield bypass”.

You’re probably already familiar with the tactic involving buying expired domains. I took a bit of a different strategy when I was younger, I would only buy expired domains that were related to world history, as it increased the likelihood of .edu and .gov backlinks.

One of the domains I acquired was called battlefieldbypass.com. It was a website that used to be related to the Civil War.

When I acquired it, it had hundreds of links and many of them were from government-run websites.

I quickly acquired the site and turned it into an online casino site. Within a few months, the site ranked number 2 on Google for the term “online casino,” which is still a highly competitive term.

On the website, I listed out the top 10 online casinos that someone could sign up for.  Every time a user signed up because of my site, I got paid an affiliate commission. The site was averaging $40,000 to $60,000 a month. Apparently, I didn’t do a great job at fine tuning the site for affiliate income, as the person ranking above me was making over $100,000 each month.

A lot of SEOs still leverage expired domains… but very few focus on ones that contain .gov and .edu links, even though they tend to be the most powerful. You also have to pay more for these expired domain names, but I never understood why someone would try to save a few bucks when the difference could mean ranking number 1 versus not.

Crazy Tactic #3: I Can Has Poker?

Have you heard of a crazy cat website called I Can Has Cheezburger? I don’t know how popular the site is at the moment, but it used to generate around 500,000,000 page views a month. Not too shabby for a site that has tons of cat memes.

The audience was so loyal that I partnered with them to run a contest. The contest was a poker giveaway in which one person would win a two-night trip to Las Vegas with $500 in spending cash and free airfare for 2 individuals to and from Las Vegas.

I can’t find the page on I Can Has Cheezburger that discusses the contest (guessing they removed it)… but here is a snapshot:

• Create a funny cat meme related to poker (they have a meme creator on their site).
• Embed the cat meme on your website to enter (the embed code linked back to my poker site).

Within a matter of days, I got over 2000 backlinks that contained the phrase “poker” and “online poker” in the anchor text. I even had I Can Has Cheezburger rotate up the embed codes so that I could make the anchor text more natural.

Within a few days, my rankings shot up to page 7 of Google for the term “online poker.” Within a week, I was ranking on page 2 and, within two weeks, I was ranking on page 1. I probably would have hit the number 1 spot, but I quickly got caught and Google pulled my ranking.

My total cost for the whole contest was under $10,000. Fifty percent of that was what I paid I Can Has Cheezburger for running the cost.

Crazy Tactic #4: WordPress Themes

What’s one thing that all WordPress themes have in common? They have a footer link to the designer.

And, what’s one thing that most WordPress theme designers have in common? Most of them create themes out of passion and rarely try to make money from them. These themes do really well, because the designers care about their work.

So, I thought it would be interesting to pay these theme owners a thousand dollars to release an update of their already popular theme. The reason I targeted existing themes is that when they release an update, it would show up in the user’s WordPress admin and they would just click a button to update the theme.

On the flip side, if I created brand new themes from scratch, there would be no guarantee that people would like the design and install it… for this reason, I onlytargeted existing themes that were popular.

Once a WordPress user added the new theme update, they would get some cool new features and, of course, a link back to one of my sites was placed in the theme footer.

The site I had the links go to was called Web Hosting Information (I don’t know how, but the site is still up… not sure who the owner is).

At one point, the site ranked in the top 3 results of Google for “web hosting.” Eventually, Google caught on and the site got slapped and the rankings plummeted.

These days, I still use WordPress themes, but more so for branding. I want more people to know me as a marketer, so I pay theme companies to include “marketed by Neil Patel” links within their theme and, of course, each link is nofollow so that I am not breaking Google’s rules.

Crazy Tactic #5: Operation Google Domination

The easiest tactic I deployed was this one. Do you remember Google Pages? It was when you could create a web page using Google’s domain name. That’s right, you could set up a site on “google.com.”

Google Pages doesn’t exist anymore… closest thing I could find is this.

I used to set up pages for highly competitive terms, like: credit cards, auto insurance and forex. From there, I would buy spammy blog links from Sponsored Reviews, Blogsvertise and Pay Per Post.

From these networks, I would obtain PageRank 4 and 5 links for around 30 bucks a pop and I would buy a few hundred at a time. In total, I spent $24,990 on paid links.

Within 60 to 90 days, I was on page one for the terms listed above, as well as other competitive key phrases.

The reason this tactic worked so well is that I was building links to Google’s own domain and it already contained tons of authority.

Eventually, Google caught on, like they always do and the pages stopped ranking.

Crazy Tactic #6: My Stat Counter

Are you familiar with StatCounter? It’s the popular analytics tool that was around way before Google Analytics. And, for StatCounter to give you stats, you have to add a counter to your site.  The counter also contains a backlink to StatCounter.

Just look at their link profile, they have over 1 billion links. That’s right… 1 BILLION.

To log into StatCounter, you once had to go to my.statcounter.com (that subdomain doesn’t exist anymore). So, I thought it would be clever to create my own stat counter type of site and called it MyStatCounter.com.

I got tons of traffic from people who typed in “my.statcounter.com” incorrectly, which resulted in lots people creating stat counters using my website.

When people would embed one of those hit counters into their site, they would automatically also link out to whatever site I wanted to promote. The embed code would contain 3rd party links and I required that people leave it on, as my service was free.

Like most of the black hat tactics I leveraged, my rankings shot up fast. It lasted for more than 2 years and worked so well that I was even selling links on My Stat Counter to other companies who would pay me.

I was smart about it as well… I would make sure that the anchor text was rotated.  So, it seemed natural and I never leveraged My Stat Counter for any of my marketing related sites or blogs.  I didn’t want to draw attention to it. Plus, when someone signed up, I would ask them what type of site they had, so that I could place relevant 3rd party links versus random ones.

None-the-less, I eventually got caught and stopped using this tactic.

Crazy Tactic #7: Arbitraging Google

Based on the tactics above, you already know that if you have a lot of links pointing to one domain, you can rank for almost anything.

In the early days of SEO, there weren’t Panda or Penguin penalties and Google’s algorithms were a lot less sophisticated.

Back in 2003, Google released AdSense, a service where people could monetize their own sites by placing Google ads on them.

So, I took one of my websites that had a high domain authority, Advice Monkey (site no longer exists) and I scraped over 100 million Google search result pages. I took each of the results within their search engine and I created millions of pages on my site that contained the same exact listing data.

My pages looked just like Google’s search pages, but with my AdSense ads all over them.

Within a month, I started to get traffic from lucrative terms that I scraped, such as “mesothelioma” and I was making $943 to $2592 a day from AdSense.

And, as you can probably guess, Google eventually shut me down for leveraging this tactic as well.

Conclusion

I know some of these tactics may seem cool and I may paint them to be glamorous, but they really aren’t. I am not proud of what I did and if I could go back in time and tell myself one thing… it would be that I shouldn’t focus on any black hat tactics.

If I focused all of my energy on legitimate white hat techniques, I wouldn’t have gone through as many sites.  Instead, I would have had one much larger site that still existed today.

Sure, in the short run, I would have made less money.  But, I started so early that in the long run, I would have been way ahead of everyone else.

The big lessons from this post should be:

1. Be creative – the best marketers tend to be the most creative ones. It doesn’t mean that you should break Google’s policies (you shouldn’t).  But, it means that you need to think outside of the box to succeed (make sure you still follow the rules).
2. Think long-term – short-term tactics may seem fun, but eventually you will get caught and you will have just wasted your time. I had months where I was making 6 figures from these tactics, but because they weren’t long-term, I also had really terrible months where I lost money.
3. Learn from black hat tactics – there are a lot of marketers who leverage black hat techniques… not just in SEO, but in all forms of marketing. You shouldn’t necessarily copy these people, but learn from them. Maybe you can take their tactics, make them white hat and apply them to your business.

Have you seen any black hat techniques that we could all learn from?

Article Source: http://neilpatel.com

How to Rank for Your Competitor’s Keywords: What We Learned by Analyzing 62.6 Million Ecommerce Keywords

Should you use the competition’s brand name in your content to get more traffic?

Will this help or hurt you? Will you be able to “steal” traffic from the other guys or will it hurt you?

Sure, there’s value in bidding on a competitor’s brand name in PPC, but what about trying to rank for these branded keywords in organic search? Should you compete with direct competitors for their keywords?

This question has puzzled SEOs for a long time.

We decided to solve the puzzle the only way I know how — with lots of data.

We performed the first comprehensive study with a data-driven solution to this question:  Should you use your competitor’s branded terms on your website or in your content to get traffic to your website?

Here’s what we wanted to discover

There are a couple different ways that an ecommerce business might want to use a competitor’s branded keywords as an organic SEO tactic.

One approach is selling a brand-name product. For example, an ecommerce site uses the keyword “Nike Air Zoom” on their product page to get more organic traffic from people who want to buy Nike’s Air Zoom shoe. Most ecommerce resellers uses this technique.

For example, look at this SERP for “air zoom womens nike.” The resellers are bidding on PPC results for the branded term.

But, ecommerce sites don’t rely on PPC alone to get branded traffic. They can earn organic traffic, as well.

Here’s a screenshot of the same SERP, showing Nike with the top four organic positions, and ecommerce resellers holding the bottom five. (This SERP had only nine organic results, because of the placement of an image carousel in the bottom position.)

If you’re operating an ecommerce store selling Nike shoes, or Michael Kors handbags or Aeron chairs, then you should be using these branded keywords as part of your SEO strategy.

But, that’s obvious.

There are more complex levels of branded keyword usage that aren’t as obvious and the potential results are not as clear.

These are the questions that didn’t have clear answers to. We were determined to get answers.

How we conducted the study

The issue becomes complicated, when you consider how variable branded terms are, what types of ecommerce businesses are trying to use them and whether the site using them is a direct competitor or an indirect competitor.

Another challenge in achieving a data-driven analysis is comparing the various types of ecommerce websites that might want to use branded keywords. Such sites would include review sites, how-to advice sites and coupon code sites.

How to sites: How-to sites would use a branded term like “Ikea” to teach people how to assemble Ikea products. The website Sparefoot, for example, provides tips, pictures, and instructions for how to assemble Ikea products without stressing out.

In the SERP screenshot below, several YouTube results and manual websites are also appearing for “IKEA” branded keywords.

Review sites: Review sites are an important place for third-party reviews that require a business other than the brand to use the branded terms.

Notice how the organic results below, in which review sites such as Digital Trends are taking the top-rank for branded terms that are now their own.

Coupon code sites: Coupon sites aggregate information about brands to help customers find discounts, so they have to use branded terms.

The organic results below, such as DealHack, are ranking for “vimeo” branded terms.

We had another challenge. How do we statistically normalize the vast amount of ranking signals between different ecommerce sites? Sites have low ranking and high-ranking for certain reasons.

What if a robust link profile is producing their top-ranked position? Or, maybe it’s the depth and comprehensiveness of the content that’s giving it ranking power.

What we did to overcome these challenges was to select two of the largest ecommerce websites, Amazon.com and Ebay.com for keyword and data analysis. These two sites would give us plenty of focused data, while also normalizing the range of ranking signals that would otherwise skew our data.

Analysis of Amazon.com

We conducted a comparative analysis of two data sets from Amazon:

1. Keywords that contained the word “review.”
2. Random keywords that did not contain the word “review.”

Comparing two groups of data would help us figure out if it’s worth it to try to organically rank for review-related keywords (or non-review related) keywords.

We counted 41.4 million keywords that produced the top 100 Google search results for Amazon.com. The number of click-throughs from these SERP results was approximately 236 million.

We further segmented this dataset to analyze all keywords that contained the term “review.” There were 465,550 such keywords out of the 41.4 million. We pulled the 30,000 review keywords that produced the highest traffic volume for Amazon. We found that their median search volume was 140 searches per month.

For non-review keywords, we extracted an equally sized randomized selection of keywords that had the same keyword volume (140 searches per month).

We answered three data-focused questions for each of these two groups of keywords:

1. How difficult are these keywords to rank for?

This is the keyword difficulty issue and we used SEMRush for our data. Other SEO tools, such as Moz and Ahrefs have metrics and algorithms that determine how difficult it is to rank for a certain keyword. It’s a really useful measurement when planning a content marketing campaign.

2. What is the CPC?

CPC or cost per click is helpful for knowing how competitive a certain search term is and how much you should bid.

For our purposes, we wanted to understand the median expenditure for the keyword group, to determine if it would be equally helpful to target these terms for organic search.

3. What is their competitive density?

Competitive density is similar to the “competition” column in Google Keyword Planner,” determined as “low,” “medium” or “high.”

This measurement determined how many advertisers are using that specific keyword in their ads. This metric would help us validate the monetary value of pursuing organic search results for ad-related terms. If the median results indicated a high competitive density, then ranking organically for the term in a crowded paid search environment would be difficult.

The highest level of competition is ranked as 1. Numbers closer to 1 (such as 0.9) would mean a high competitive density, but smaller numbers (such as 0.02) would mean a relatively low competitive density.

Answering these two questions for review keywords and non-review keywords would give us a strong understanding of how a site can rank for such terms and if it would be wise to do so.

Here is our analysis.

Takeaways: Competitive density moves with CPC, so those two numbers will roughly parallel each other in the paid sphere. However, median keyword difficulty is where we identify the organic ranking potential of these terms.

Surprisingly, non-review keywords (those without brand names attached to them) have only half of the CPC value of branded keywords.

Even though these branded keywords are more valuable from a paid perspective, they are less difficult to organically rank for than their more expensive counterparts.

If we remove paid search and cost from the equation entirely, it would make sense for a business to focus their organic search efforts on branded (non-”review”) keywords. They have higher transactional intent, greater overall value and an improved likelihood of ranking.

The takeaway from this data is this: Find branded keywords from your indirect competitors and target them in your content marketing.

Analysis of eBay.com

Our eBay analysis used the same methodology, but took a different angle in the analysis.

The keyword set for eBay was smaller, so we used nearly all of the keywords (consisting of search volumes greater than 10/month) that directed traffic to eBay.com. This amounted to 21.2 million keywords. The median search volume was 40.

We analyzed two data sets:

1. Non-branded keywords — those that did not contain any brand terms, including “ebay.”
2. Branded keywords — keywords containing some brand name, such as “invicta” or “philadelphia eagles.”

Here is how the two sets compare:

What’s the message shown in this data? Median keyword difficulty is roughly the same across all keyword types. If we consider the difficulty to be equal, then it makes sense to focus our organic search efforts on the most valuable keyword.  We analyzed a subset, to understand how “coupon” keywords play into the mix. Here is what we discovered.

The most valuable keywords, as indicated by CPC, are the coupon keywords. These “coupon” insights are helpful, because a “coupon” keyword conveys clear search intent. The user wants to buy something. Coupon keywords have a high likelihood of conversion, which is why they have high CPC bidding.

The other valuable set of keywords are branded terms. It makes good sense, both from a strategy and an effort perspective, to focus on those valuable terms that will help to convert more visitors into buyers.

How to Use Branded Keywords to Gain More Traffic to Your Site: A Step-by-Step Approach

The data tells us that it’s smart to use branded keywords in your organic search strategy. That brings up the obvious question. How?

First, here’s what not to do: All this talk about using your competitor’s branded keywords might make you think that you should target direct competitors.

You should not do this.

Why not?

Conversion Problems

First, because there is no reliable way to convert this traffic. If a user has a transactional intent on a given branded keyword, then he or she is expecting to carry through with that intent.

As early as 2008, Google recognized the importance that users placed upon brand and the weighted consideration that this had in perception and affinity. Eric Schmidt said, “Brand affinity is clearly hardwired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”

Whether you’re going to find the brand affinity gene or not isn’t the issue. The issue is that people do care about brands. If you rank for the brand of a direct competitor, this will not give the user a good experience.

Confusion Problems

Second, it produces brand confusion. Ranking for your direct competitor’s brand name may sound all sneaky and smart.  But, in reality, it’s going to confuse people. To use an extreme example, why would the Adidas website come up when I google “Nike”? Did Adidas buy them out? Is Google choking on it’s own algorithm. The user gets confused.

Other Agencies Don’t Do It

Third, we didn’t notice any of the top marketing agencies doing this on their websites. As a corollary study to this one, we examined how some of the best online agencies were using branded terms in their content. We did not identify any instances where they were seeking organic traffic by using direct competitors’ branded keywords.

It’s too hard.

Ousting a brand from its top ranked Google position is nearly impossible. How do you outrank “CNN” for the term “CNN”? You can’t.

The trickle-down effect holds true in more diluted brand queries or longtails. When adding “coupon” or “review” to those branded terms, however, the game is wide open. Anyone can rank.

So, what kind of branded competitor keywords should you use?

Indirect competition.

The ranking potential is higher, the value is greater and the results are much more appealing. Here’s how to do it.

How to identify your indirect competitors? – First, you need to figure out who your indirect competitors are. How do you find this out?

An indirect competitor is a business in the same industry that sells a different product or service.

Here’s how to find your indirect competitors.

1. Google each one of your most important keywords.
2. For each keyword, make a list of all of the businesses that have paid search results.
3. From this list, identify those who are direct competitors vs. indirect competitors. You’ll recognize a direct competitor, because it’s a business that is selling the same product or service to the same market.
4. Create a list of all of the indirect competitors for each keyword.

If you’re selling physical products on your ecommerce store, it might be difficult to find indirect competitors by simply Googling product-related keywords. Most of the paid results are ecommerce sites that sell the same product.

Instead, you may need to Google related keywords, using terms like this:

• [branded product] review
• [branded product] rating
• [branded product] coupon
• [branded product] customer reviews
• [branded product] benefits

Look at both the organic and paid results in order to find indirect competitors.

For example, let’s say I’m selling women’s Nike Zoom shoes on my ecommerce website. All of the paid search results are direct competitors.

To find indirect competitors, I need to broaden my search. This time, I search for “womens nike zoom reviews.”

The organic results display at least four indirect competitors.

Each of these sites do not sell the product directly, as I do with my ecommerce store. Instead, these sites publish product information and aggregate reviews. They also provide product comparisons and links to ecommerce sites where the product is sold.

This is an example of an indirect competitor that is ranking for a “reviews” branded keyword.

Identify the branded keywords that are driving the most traffic to the competition – It’s your goal to steal as much traffic as possible from these indirect competitors. Since you offer a complementary product or service, users who search for the indirect competitor may be interested in your offering.

If you have an SEMRush account, open it up and enter the domain of your indirect competitor.

Scroll down to the “Top Organic Keywords” section. Click “Full Report.”

Notice all of the keywords that are branded. In the example above, each of the top websites (except Facebook) are MS-branded keywords:  “Microsoft,” “Hotmail,” “Windows 10” and “Internet Explorer.”

If the website is small, you may be able to use all of the terms in the chart. If you’re dealing with a very large indirect competitor, then you should filter the keyword results or select a limited number to compete with.

Now, rank for these keywords. How? Use these keywords in your site content – Now that you have a list of your indirect competitors and all of their keyword targets, it’s time to use them on your own site.

Don’t just drop them carelessly into your content. Instead, you should create focused and comprehensive content that directly addresses a topic or concern about this indirect competitor or their branded product or service.

Remember, your goal isn’t to roast the indirect competitor. You might want to do a helpful review of their services or explain how their product benefits yours.

Make sure that your content is comprehensive and deep. This will dramatically improve your chance of gaining organic traffic.

Here’s a step-by-step strategy for ranking for these keywords:

1. Take your list of indirect-competitor keywords and queries.
2. Develop a piece of content around each keyword. Use the keyword as the subject matter, and develop the title around the keyword. For example, if you had the keyword “Windows 10” in your list, you could create a blog article titled “16 Advanced Customization Tactics for Windows 10 Power Users.”
3. Discuss the keyword from every possible angle, making sure you use deal with any relevant topics. Using the Windows 10 example, you would research the topic thoroughly, and be sure to discuss topics and terms such as “theme,” “Cortana,” and “sync.”
4. Make sure the content piece is at least 2,000 words long.
5. Publish!

Track data and user engagement – It’s not quite enough to just write your piece and let it go.

If you’re tracking your keywords, for example, make sure that you add these new competitor branded terms to your keyword tracking tool, to see how the content piece performs.

Conclusion

Here are the most important takeaways from our data analysis.

1. Should you use the competition’s brand name in your website content to get more organic search traffic to your site? Yes.
2. Will this help or hurt you? Help you.
3. Will you be able to “steal” traffic from the other guys? Yes.
4. Will it come back and bite you? Only if you target direct competitors.

It’s crazy to think that you can steal your indirect competitors traffic by using their branded keywords. But, it’s true. It works.

And, it’s not as hard as you might think!

Probably the most surprising takeaway from our data was this: it’s just as easy to rank for branded keywords as non-branded keywords, but twice as valuable.

Sure, I’m as eager to use paid search just as much as the next guy. It has its place. But, in the world of internet marketing, organic search still wins.

When we analyzed these 62.6 million ecommerce keywords, we didn’t know what we’d find. In the end, we answered all of our questions and gained some incredible insights.

Article Source: http://neilpatel.com