Thread: Survey: Blackhat SEO
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Old 08-29-2007, 06:10 PM   #18 (permalink)
DaveEMG
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  1. 1. What do you see as the line (however blurry) that seperates BH and WH? Try to give some examples.
  2. Whenever an exploit exists that is obviously not in the best interests of the user.
  3. 2. Do you practice BH?
  4. No.
  5. 3. Why or why not?
  6. There's ample money to be made while making the web a better place / less cluttered / more useful.
  7. 4. If yes, do you own both BH sites and WH sites? Which do you focus more time on?
  8. 5. How do you feel about people who practice what you consider blackhat?
  9. Generally poorly. Blackhatters aren't adding to the richness of the medium. Blackhatters are essentially website-based spammers.
  10. 6. Check all that you CONSIDER blackhat with an X. Check twice if you've done it, are doing it, or plan to do it. Check three times if you simply consider it stepping WAY out of line.
  11. [x] Mass site generation
  12. Comments:
  13. [x] Content scrapers (possibly markoved)
  14. Comments: Probably the worst. This is outright copyright theft.
  15. [x] Trackback spamming
  16. Comments:
  17. [x] Comment spamming
  18. Comments:
  19. [x] Blogfarms on your own domains
  20. Comments:
  21. [x] Mass generating parasite hosting accounts (e.g. blogger.com, wordpress.org) for the purpose of building links (blogfarms fall under this category)
  22. Comments:
  23. [x] Mass generating those accounts for the purpose of gaining many links to them in a short time, and redirecting traffic to another site
  24. Comments:
  25. [] Automating directory submission, including topsites
  26. Comments: Directories should be automated; it should be straightforward to get a site listed on the web.
  27. [x] Breaking CAPTCHAs, or otherwise bypassing them
  28. Comments: Captchas only exist because spammers & blackhatters exist.
  29. [] Exploiting social news sites (digg, reddit, etc) to gain traffic MANUALLY
  30. Comments: Depends on the exploit.
  31. [x] Exploiting those sites in an automated fashion to gain traffic OR links. Specify which
  32. Comments:
  33. [x] Using social networks in an automated fashion to gain traffic
  34. Comments: Again, social networks work much better when there is trust between users that there is an actual person on the other end of the transaction.
  35. [] Digg rings/exchanges, stumble exchanges, or anything of the sort
  36. Comments:
  37. [] Keyword stuffing (including tricks to hide blocks of text)
  38. Comments: Up to the SE's to understand the pages.
  39. [] Referral Spamming
  40. Comments:
  41. [x] Cloaking - showing relevant but highly "SEO"ed pages to the search engines (this includes things like scraped markoved content - please specifiy in the comments), and more friendly content to the user
  42. Comments:
  43. [] Reciprocal Linking
  44. Comments: The web has always been based on the quality of reciprocal linking.
  45. [] Buying/selling Links
  46. Comments: No, again, the web is all about linking, free or commercially.
  47. [] Exploiting Widespread XSS Vulnerabilities to gain Links
  48. Comments: I dunno what XSS is, but I'm guessing probably bad.
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