Blackhat vs. Whitehat Link BuildingBlurring the line

Branko Rihtman (@neyne)

Intro

Link building Nirvana:

- Quality content- Linkable assets- Linkbait- Great navigation structure- 404 pages

Link building reality:

- Competitive niches- $$$/link inflation- Nofollow planet- Anchor text links- Bad communication with IT department

Only Whitehat linking works. Blackhat is immoral/illegal/kills puppies and eats unicornsIt also gets you banned from Google!!!

@neyne

Keyword Search Volume (global, exact match)

Position

Keyword 1 550K #3

Keyword 2 4.4K #2

Keyword 3 6.5K #1

Keyword 4 74K #5

Financial niche

- Review of 90% of the links- Targeting both generic keywords

and competing brand names- Thin content (later expansion)- Not an EMD- Affiliate links to several renown services

in the field- Held top positions for about 6 months

AUTOMATED SPAM LINKS

@neyne

Keyword Monthly Search Volume

(global, exact match)

Position

Keyword 1 210K #2

Keyword 2 3K #2

Keyword 3 1K #1

Travel niche

- ~100 indexed pages, 70 PDFs- 30,491 external links- 30,297 from 15 domains- ALL of them sitewide, sidebar,

[keyword 1] anchor (or slight variation)- All of the linking domains travel-related

SPONSORED LINKS

@neyne

Gambling

Pills

Lega

lOnline Education

Insu

ranc

ePayday Loans

Financial Travel

SMX Advanced 2010 (June 2010):

Question about paid links: Matt says they have a couple new tools that are “really fun” for dealing with paid links. He describes them as “laser-guided scalpels.”http://searchengineland.com/live-blog-matt-cutts-smx-advanced-43906

E-commerce

@neyne

Florida Update – November 2003

Vince Update – February 2009

On-site Nofollow elimination – June 2009 (2008)

Paid links

Link exchange schemes

Automated links

How to interpret Google statements

Talked about Not Talked about

=

@neyne

Conclusions:

- Become too big to fail

- Content is nice, anchor is king

- Don’t listen to SE representatives/Forums/Blogs/Conference presentationsTest to see what works.

- If you are using less-than-white techniques, make sure you are prepared to sufferthe consequences

- You don’t have to achieve everything with each link.

@neyne