Fuck, is there such a thing as "Whitehat SEO"?

avatar33

avatar33

e-Hustler
Dec 5, 2009
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Calgary, AB
I've been thinking about this lately, after watching a video of Randy from SEOMOZ saying how everything they do is Whitehat and that all SEO professionals/firms doing article marketing, directory submissions or social bookmarking are basically doing Blackhat SEO.

It made me think: How can ANY form of Link Building be considered White Hat? Even if you're doing guest posting on relevant blogs/websites (which is probably considered the most "white hat" technique today), you're still doing it only for 1 reason: Get that link juice from the keyword you're gonna stick in there. You're basically trying to make Google think that that's a natural vote from that website to yours, which is NOT the case. You requested that fucking link.

IMHO there are 2 kinds of SEO: Grey Hat and Black Hat.

I guess the only thing that could be considered White Hat is On-Site SEO, but Link Building?! No fucking way.

Anyone agrees?
 


White Hat = You got shit load of money to spend on links, or a lot of time on your hands (so you make make it look pretty).

Black Hat = Get a shit load of links for as little $$ as possible.

Its all a money game and Google politics...
 
IMHO there is no clear definition for white hat or black hat. It depends on who use the term "Black Hat" or White or whatever hat it is.

Google would say "If you do any link building that's black hat". "Improve the quality and let others link you naturally, it is white hat"
 
Rand is just a douche. What's funny is that the way he speaks in that video . . . he speaks with this kind of self-righteous seo faggotry.

Rand's clients probably have huge budgets and big brands. Can you do PURE white hat SEO with big brands and huge budgets? Of course.

But if you're like most of us who have B2B clients only spending a few k a month and manufacturing things like gaskets, sealants and other stuff no one gives a shit about, it's pretty much impossible, or just plain horrible ROI, to try to do anything whitehat.

Yeah, bros, have an employee waste an entire day TRYING to get that awesome link from that site that MIGHT (but probably won't) ever respond to you. The ROI is horrible. Greyhat works and allows people to maintain a decent ROI.

This is the video that officially made me hate Rand.
 
onlinemoniez said:
Rand is just a douche. What's funny is that the way he speaks in that video . . . he speaks with this kind of self-righteous seo faggotry.
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It wouldn't surprise me if he has used other methods himself in the past and that he also would if he left to go run his own e-commerce sites or whatever. It is actually in his interests to try to be recognized as the de facto white knight of the seo world, just like it is in the interest of a police chief to take a strong stance against drugs in public, even if they smoke pot in private.
 
Moxie said:
It wouldn't surprise me if he has used other methods himself in the past and that he also would if he left to go run his own e-commerce sites or whatever. It is actually in his interests to try to be recognized as the de facto white knight of the seo world, just like it is in the interest of a police chief to take a strong stance against drugs in public, even if they smoke pot in private.
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He has blogged about how he used to buy links and it was easy and worked really well and it's how his consulting business helped pull him out of massive debt. But he stopped because of the potential risks he was taking on for his clients.

There's a massive difference between what people toss around here in terms of black hat (namely link spam) and real black hat techniques like hacking sites and edus. Most stuff people call black is really just gray. Then again, it's all semantic bullshittery anyways.

Make sites build links and profit.
 
What kills me is that it's not just Randy... he's built an army of SEO Knights in Shining Armor (like that guy Wil Reynolds from Seer interactive) that go around in conferences like SMX to talk about what White Hat SEO IS and how everyone else is doing it wrong. I wish someone would step up in one of those conferences and say: STFO you're all building fake love regardless how you want to call it! You have the luxury of polishing it and making it look pretty because your client is spending $100k a month, but it's not that different from what we're all trying to achieve here for a fraction of that cost!
 
Well, when a fortune 500 client comes along you'd get laughed out of the building recommending running Xrumer or scrapebox for them. I have always done non white hat practices for my ecommerce/am, but when it comes to big name clients we cannot pull that shit. For example we'd do the following for a "big" client;

- get links from app sites because they had an iphone/android app
- created an ipad magazine for them which nets links but that's only a 1/5th of the benefit
- link bait
- getting interviewed on industry blogs
- guest blogging that's actually good in regards to content and the target blog..BMR...lolz and fuck no
- infographics
- press releases through prnewswire/prweb etc when the news is actually news, not fluff
- getting them cited in the news
- broken link building
- viral stunts

Wil Reynolds is a great person with a ninja mind who does things a certain way because that's what his big clients are expecting. You all can afford to have massive link value lost because you can build up another site and move on. Big brands need to stay more squeaky clean, it's as simple as that.
 
It is cool if they build brands for big companies, but I hate when they parade around and pretending to be some white holy fucking warriors fighting evil... Makes me sick..
 
dchuk said:
Then again, it's all semantic bullshittery anyways.
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It really is, just Googles way of wanting to call anything that tries to manipulate their search engines "bad". Their algorithms fail at detecting us, so it's the manipulators fault... :uhoh2:
 
@Ryan Fortunes 500 of course! They have the money to spend on SEO so you can get into those fancier ways of manipulating Search rankings LOL. But do you do all that shit with a client that has 1-2k a month to spend?

The problem is that these White Knights have such a strong Media exposure, that they were able to create this FEAR in people's minds of anything that is Grey, Blue or Black Hat. Now the 1st question you get when a client calls you is: Are you guys 100% white hat? If you every mention the word "Grey" you get hung up on like a criminal LOL without even a chance to explain yourself... and I'm talking about small time clients here... small local businesses with less than 3k monthly budgets. So now we have to lie and say we're 100% White Hat to get business? Great! Thanks Randy!
 
avatar33 said:
@Ryan Fortunes 500 of course! They have the money to spend on SEO so you can get into those fancier ways of manipulating Search rankings LOL. But do you do all that shit with a client that has 1-2k a month to spend?

The problem is that these White Knights have such a strong Media exposure, that they were able to create this FEAR in people's minds of anything that is Grey, Blue or Black Hat. Now the 1st question you get when a client calls you is: Are you guys 100% white hat? If you every mention the word "Grey" you get hung up on like a criminal LOL without even a chance to explain yourself... and I'm talking about small time clients here... small local businesses with less than 3k monthly budgets. So now we have to lie and say we're 100% White Hat to get business? Great! Thanks Randy!
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Why are you doing SEO for clients in the first place? SEO is a commodity. Rank your own sites.
 
@avatar I tell them that if you(the client) want to buy some links or do something "darker" then I'm down as long as we do it smart. We buy links for our clients who want to, but we just contact sites not apart of any network and tempt them with monies. Most of the time we'll offer really really good content and one of the 10 links in their will be for a client. Half of our clients are in the 2-3k range and staying away from the services section here isn't too hard.
 
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