90 Digital CEO Nick Garner gives us tips on monitoring Black Hat in this edition of CalvinAyre.com’s SEO Tip of the Week.
Learning from Black Hat- black hat still works, look up key words, study black hat sites that rank well, implement some of their strategies without breaking the rules too much
Hi this is my SEO tip of the week – extended version!
I have learnt so much from studying blackhat seo. Irishwonder, the notorious black hat works on the 90 digital team, not because we spam, but because we want to understand what the algorithm responds to. When you understand that, you can water those ideas down and get on and rank.
One of the biggest misconceptions based on our research is with geolocation and links. It turns out spemmers ranking on google.co.uk regularly rank off 90% non uk links. In fact a recent one for payday loans mostly had Eastern European links.
So this is why I am not that sensitive about getting a certain quota of UK links to rank in the UK, because spammers have proven it’s unnecessary.
Of course you can go too hardcore and loading up on totally irrelevant links from random sites on random countries. So if you get a manual review if your link set is undeniably spammy you will go down, so moderation on geolocation is important.
Another thing I have noticed is the timescales for ranking. It seems to take about 2 months from domain inception to links being loaded up on the domain and then rankings in competitive phrases. I have also noticed there is about a 3 week lag on links having an effect.
What I take from this is if you have a BIG digital PR campaign with something hot people want to link to then (yes you got it) it’s important to run the campaign about 3-4 weeks before your peak rankings.
The best places to see this ‘SEO zoo’ is on the biggest money phrases where commissions for affiliates are very high:
- ‘payday loans’
- ‘casino bonus’
- accident at work keywords
