I have been spending some time on Blackhat forums and websites and am thinking about creating a Hub about it. Purely for information/interest purposes and to educate Hubbers here to the tactics used by scammers & content thieves. I just don't want to get any of my (legitimate/legal/whitehat) accounts banned.
Some of the the things I have learned-
Hosting companies that offer services with a 'we ignore DMCA take down notices' guarantee.
1000 Facebook Likes/Youtube Views/Pinterest Followers/Twitter Followers/Google +1s can be purchased for as little as $5
Article spinning services that will pass plagiarism checkers guaranteed or your money back.
Twitter/Pinterest/Facebook/Instagram bots for sale.
SEO services to get your site to the top of Google.
People making $1000 per day from these methods.
I am in no way endorsing/encouraging or condoning these tactics but I thought it would make an interesting Hub.
Thoughts?
There are a few hubs on HP about that topic already. I didn't read them (not my cup of tea).
It's a fascinating topic.
I had a peek over in some of the Blackhat forums recently and I was appalled and intrigued in equal measures. They are extremely casual when discussing sneaky ways of getting people to come to their sites. Many of them make buckets of money throwing up spun content. I remember one guy proclaiming that his worst material brought in the most money because the articles were so bad that people clicked on the ads instead.
He was preaching to the other forum members that original, well-written content is unnecessary to make sales. He was also enamored with paid backlinking, which I thought was old-fashioned practices, but he reckoned it was the best way to get people to your site. This was some of the advice they were dispensing: have loads of sites; get the punters in; bore them with your articles; get them clicking; have lots of fall-back websites in case Google discovers your rubbish; don't put them all on WMT in case they contaminate each other...etc. There is even some trick that they use to find articles from lapsed webpages, so they can steal them, sell them and spin them. Shocking behaviour!
I would love to read your article, but don't know how safe your account would be. Perhaps something like 'How to Protect Your Site From Blackhat SEO' might balance the boat.
I found it appalling and surprising when I read comments on those forums too, and also I have even seen videos of people who practice black hat SEO in which they were proud of their tactics and encouraged people to do the same as them. Probably they lose everything eventually, I'm sure it catches up to them, and then they start complaining about how unfair sites are that won't let them use their tactics, etc.
I sure hope so because these guys were extremely confident that they could run rings around all the G algorithms.
There are confident because that is what they do everyday!
After posting here I nipped over to BHW to see what else they were up to and I found a thread that had over 70 pages in it (I'm still reading it!). It's the one that Meathead wrote for newbies to make $100 a day.Absolutely fascinating stuff and I have to admit, quite tempting.
The only thing that puts me off is trying to make quality spam comments all day long for weeks. Though the idea of spamming everyone is repugnant, I like the way you bypass all the waiting and sniveling and groveling you have to do for Google.
Have you read that thread? What are your thoughts?
From what I have read they spread the risk, use different networks, accounts, proxies and such so that if one goes under there are other sources of income.
haha, yeah some of those posts you mentioned sound familiar! You can understand why people get into it, you spend ages created decent content on sites like this and make pennies, you rip off content and use blackhat methods and make thousands!
Maybe they are all disgruntled ex Squidoo and Hubpages members!
If you created a Hub which "promotes or provides instructional information about illegal activities" you would jeopardize both your HubPages and AdSense accounts.
(That is the exact snip of the terms of use which seems to most closely apply to your Hub idea)
Well I was not planning on creating anything which would provide instructions, merely an insight into the darker side of the internet, akin to reports on human trafficking and the like which in no way promotes it but simply raises awareness.
Maybe I'll save it for a separate blog.
It's all about interpretation.
Can you explain how people plan and carry out bank robberies while making sure in no way the article encourages anyone to think robbing banks is good or profitable and doesn't provide any information as to how it's actually done?
That would be the challenge with writing about blackhat techniques. But if your Hub got misinterpreted, you chosen topic comes with no tolerance for "go back and fix it" and shortcuts right to "your AdSense account is banned for life."
It would be a great article because people, writers in particular, should know what black hat SEO even is; many are unaware and could get caught in something that is, in the end, unprofitable.
However, it does sound like it could be borderline against TOS.
Maybe you should Go on and expose these tricks and render them useless ...... or maybe you shouldn't expose them but use them to earn.
Don't risk it. I'd say you should just publish it on another blog. Even though it's sounds like a VERY interesting article, it could be interpreted wrongly by the folks at AdSense.
I see no difference between the method described over there and the numerous exhortations we get here to spam as many social networking sites, blogs and forums covering slightly relevant topics as we can with links to our hubs.
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