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People are always struggling to figure out how they will get their website to rank well in Google. Of course, who can blame them. Google accounts for 50%-60% of all search traffic on the Internet.

But there are right ways (whitehat) and wrong ways (blackhat) to accomplish the goal of great rankings in Google.

What Is Whitehat and Blackhat?

Whitehat and Blackhat is a reference to the old cowboy westerns of previous generations. The good guys of the movies always wore a “white hat”, and the bad guys of the cowboy western movies always wore a “blackhat”.

At the Phantom Writers, we have always encouraged our readers and customers to stick with Whitehat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques. The reason we make this recommendation is that to do otherwise may lead to ugly consequences.

If you succeed in getting to the top of the Google search results using Blackhat SEO techniques, you might be able to profit now and for the short-term, but a day will come when Google will catch on to your Blackhat SEO activities and wipe out your early gains in their search index. If Google finds you to be using Blackhat Fish techniques (techniques for manipulating your Google ranking that the wizards at Google disapprove of), then Google might just have to ban your website from their search results.

We believe that you should always strive to build for a prosperous tomorrow in such a way that you do not put your gains at risk of Google’s policies about inappropriately trying to manipulate their search index.

How Google Determines What Websites Should Rank In Its Search Index

Google tells us that we need to have links pointing to our websites in order to rank better in the search results. It is the foundational concept of Link Popularity, which defines one of the primary ingredients of the Google algorithm.

Google believes in the value of letting other people determine the worth of a web page. The way that Google determines the worth of a web page is to decide how many human beings have voted on the value of a web page by counting how many other web pages point to the target web page.

But Google has had to be a bit more clever than just counting links to a web page from other web pages. The SEO community has always found ways to manipulate Google’s Link Popularity algorithm for the benefit of their search engine optimization customers.

As a result, Google has always had to fight back against the SEO manipulation of Google’s search results, to ensure a more honest assessment of a web pages’ worth. To ensure the integrity of their search index, Google needs to make sure that those with deep, deep pockets do not hold Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) hostage.

Keyword stuffing is dead - thank God… Do you realize how unattractive and unreadable keyword stuffed pages are to read for the reader? For example:

If Blackhat Fish is my key term, then the keyword stuffing nut will try to weave Blackhat Fish into the story at X% keyword density. But a strong density of Blackhat Fish within any web page is not only silly for the reader to have to see, but tough for the reader to follow. If done incorrectly, you will lose your audience after about the twelfth Blackhat Fish reference. When done based on percentage numbers, no matter how you complete the text, you will scare away your readers, who were hoping to be your customers. So, I should find somehow to thread my target phrase Blackhat Fish into the text without actually offending my human audience.

In this previous paragraph 10 words are target keywords (Blackhat Fish), and there are only 114 words. I know the paragraph reads badly, but I needed to show you how overplaying the phrase Blackhat Fish would actually look. That paragraph with 10 target keywords and 114 words total is right at 8.8% keyword density. That was a hideous read, wasn’t it?

Link Farms were among the first SEO created tools to be killed. Hidden text on a web page was killed. Link exchanges are dead. In 2007, most link directories lost their value for linking to other websites. In 2007, paid links also began the process of dying.

When Google looks at the aforementioned SEO strategies, Google declares, “they are dead to us.”

Google Recommends That We Fish For Links

It is kind of funny all of the fishing references that have entered into Google lexicon…

Download Video

Google (through its mouthpiece Matt Cutts) suggests that we should build links to our websites using two methods, Link Baiting and Article Marketing. He made that suggestion in the video shown above.

The concept of Link Baiting is creating content that people will want to set up links to.

Here is where the equation gets interesting.

Article Marketing as a Link Building Technique

Remember the mention previously about how all great SEO Link Building techniques, such as Link Exchanges and Paid Links, were eventually discounted or ignored by Google?

The good news is that Google has found a way to decide the worth of a particular article for Google’s Link Popularity algorithm. In January of 2008, I wrote another article explaining how they can see the worth of an article and count legitimate votes for the article. That article was published on SEO-News.com, and can be read here: “SEO Linking Portfolio“.

If you don’t want to read that article, I will sum it up here in a nutshell. Reprint articles once written are placed in Article Directories, like the Article Directory we have on our website. If six months down the road the article ONLY appears in Article Directories, then chances are good that the article is a crap article that no one liked. On the other hand, if an article is on Article Directories AND on ordinary websites AND on blogs, then chances are good that the article is good and people actually liked the article. When an article ends up on websites that are not Article Directories, then Google knows that real people have voted for that article by publishing it on his or her website.

So, the challenge in the link building game is to create content and tools that people want to link their websites to (Link Bait) and to create article content that people actually want to publish.

When Google decides that a particular article has value to the Internet community, then Google will count many of those links to your website. Google of course will not count all of the links to your website from the web pages hosting your articles, but they will count many of those links as legitimate links.

Whitehat vs. Blackhat: Fish for Links

When you write an article and distribute it to the masses, the first key to building real Link Popularity is to write an article that people want to read. The second key is to write an article that people are happy to have read. This is the essence of Whitehat Article Marketing.

If you write a crap article and try to force feed it on the public, then you will find failure with your article marketing efforts. “Force Feeding” is a very accurate description, since anyone in their right mind will not publish anything on their website that would keep people from returning to their website over and again. This is the essence of Blackhat Article Marketing.

Whitehat Article Marketing is a process that could deliver its user huge results. For example, the aforementioned article about your SEO Linking Portfolio was a great article that generated more than two thousand visitors to my website on the day that it was published and many more visitors since. In addition, the article where it appears on SEO-News.com has been linked to by at least 47 web pages (according to Google) and as of June 2008, it had a Google PageRank of 5.

The thing about what Google will count and what Google will not count relies upon what other people might link to, once again. The SEO Linking Portfolio article on SEO-News.com has been linked directly at least 47 times and it has a PR5.

Google notes a few dozen placements of the article on other websites, and Yahoo notes a few hundred places this article has been published. Google has decided that only a few dozen copies of the few hundred copies of the article should be recorded in its public search results. So, it is clear that while Yahoo notes many copies of the article, Google feels that only a portion of those placements are worth mentioning. That is because only a portion of those placements have any actual worth or value according to Google’s search algorithms. In general the copies of the article that Google notes in its SERPs are the only copies of the article that have been linked from other websites.

Why this is important to note is that in the quest for links, I managed to get the article on hundreds of websites, but Google did and always will only count a portion of those links to my website from my article as links worthy of counting.

Returning to the fishing analogy, I have cast hundreds of lines into the web with that one article. In return, I have managed to catch a few dozen Google-worthy links back to my website from that article.

The article cannot be considered Blackhat link fishing, since people actually did like the article enough to post it on numerous websites and other people liked it enough to link to it on many of those websites.

In Conclusion…

Matt Cutts has said that the Google-approved kinds of links will be those derived from Link Baiting and from Article Marketing.

To learn more about Google-approved SEO techniques, visit Matt Cutts blog.

Although we do not recommend Blackhat SEO techniques in general, a lot of cool stuff can be learned by reading case studies implemented by people who play with Blackhat SEO techniques. May we recommend the Shouting Zone forum to those who wish to learn from Blackhat search optimization specialists.

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Bill Platt - owner of The Phantom Writers

Visit Bill’s website to learn about his Article Distribution services, his Article Ghost Writing services, Deep Links submission services, or Blogging Services. If you write your own articles, you will find his Article Writing Secrets ebook to be an essential part of your article marketing education.

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