Blackhat & Reality

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maverick

maverick

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Oct 5, 2006
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If we are to believe everything we read online then getting involved in black hat results in the loss of your adsense and affiliate accounts, banned hosting accounts and a swat team coming throw your front door

Over the last few days I have spent hours researching material and listening to audio from many will known “super affiliates” who all seem to say that they make a lot of their cash using blackhat technology

These people with $20000+ Adsense checks and $50000 affiliate payouts must be watched by Google and the affiliate managers so it would be very easy for them to tell if they are using scraper sites etc so why are they not banned? Is it a case that nobody really cares and a lead is a lead?
 


It really depends on how "black" you are. If you are just scraping content, then that might not get you banned. What gets you banned is when you start doing things to create "fake" clicks or "fake" sales so to speak. If you are running click fraud engines, that'll get you banned, if you are telling people to click on your ads, that will get you banned, but it usually takes some real fraudulent activities to get banned. Something as simple as scraping or blog spamming isn't enough usually and I don't think that most affiliate programs care.
 
The general rule is that as long as the leads are good then everyone is happy. When I do a campaign I ALWAYS think to myself, 'If the advertiser sees this what will they think?' At the end of the day, the ADVERTISER pays the bills. I'm not talking about GOOG or the CPA Network. I am talking about the mortgage broker paying at the end of the line for the lead. They are the ones that need to be happy. If you create fake clicks and send false leads then you deserve to be banned.

Finding innovative and creative ways to squeek a message into a unique place is not gonna to piss an advertiser off. It is going to get them leads and that will make them happy. Sometimes the leads are off a lower quality for various reasons. But Goog manages that by monitoring many things and lowering payouts. CPA networks moniter that with feedback from the advertisers and regularily adjust payouts on a case by case basis accordingly.

Black Hat != Crook
Black Hat == Crafty

I talk to my affilaite managers (and the CEO's of most CPA networks) Daily. Before i do something grey, I ASK them what they think and we find an acceptable balance of creative and technique. Then we see what the results are and tweak accordingly. Cooperation... its a game we like to play.
 
For Google and the like money talks. If you are making them money, they are much more tolerant in what they will accept.
 
The only really serious issue any company cares about is spamming. Shoemoney has mentioned a site that was clearly going against Google's TOS that he was spending a lot of money on. Even though he complained they didn't seem too eager to stop them.

Put it this way. If Google was to kick out their top earners the impact would show up on their next quarterly earnings statement. That means their stock price drops & less gourmet meals and play time over at the Google campus.
 
Andrew said:
The only really serious issue any company cares about is spamming. Shoemoney has mentioned a site that was clearly going against Google's TOS that he was spending a lot of money on. Even though he complained they didn't seem too eager to stop them.

Put it this way. If Google was to kick out their top earners the impact would show up on their next quarterly earnings statement. That means their stock price drops & less gourmet meals and play time over at the Google campus.
Click to expand...

I was under the impression that he didn't complain, but was very happy with the traffic as it was converting for him. He just contacted google to see if he could do the same.

IMO, google would be much less tolerant than your typical affiliate program.
 
greyhat

Sitemaker said:
Blackhat money is good money.
Click to expand...

from what i've heard, Greyhat is where the true money is. the results look like a true whitehat site to the bots and seasoned webmasters but is built using blackhat methods.
 
...just to mention that FRAUD is not considered BH, and that includes any ILLEGAL online-activities.

Also, when it comes to the BH/GH realm, it's is much bigger than most WH webmasters realize, it includes Digg machines (and other social bookmarking machines), blog account automation including CAPTCHA decoding, sidebar sitemap cloaking, XSS exploits combined with tinyurls, other script exploits, content generation by scraping, Markov, language translation or other methods, etc. As well, php can be used extensively with cloaking to manipulate content no end! For example, affiliate links can be stripped out so they're invisible to the SEs, authority links can be randomly inserted into content, additional content can be appended to pages for bolstering position in the SERPS, etc. If you want to learn more, I would recommend getting Jaimie Sirovich's forthcoming book, SEO with PHP (it includes a cloaking script and many other useful nuggets.)
 
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Thanks for the advice, put a backorder in for the book and bought php for dummies, I normally just hire from freelance sites but its always good to learn :)
 
maverick said:
Thanks for the advice, put a backorder in for the book and bought php for dummies, I normally just hire from freelance sites but its always good to learn :)
Click to expand...

Yep, if you're serious about BH, learn php well - it's a must! Sometimes, all that's needed is just a few lines of code, and you can hardly goto Elance for that.
 
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