Blackhat - not what it’s cracked up to be
In the past year or so there has been A LOT of hype surrounding blackhat. If you go on any webmaster forum occasionally someone will mention blackhat as if it some sort of magical solution to ranking well or making lots of money in a short period of time. But this coudn’t be further from the truth. While blackhat can be effective, is is very difficult to master and the vast majority of people who try blackhat will fail.
The main issue with blackhat is that too many people are doing it. between 2002 and 2004 there was a lot of money to be made with content generators, edu spamming, splogging, and other blackhat methods. Then as more people joined the bandwaggon blackhat became more difficult.
Google also began to implement various filters to help combat blackhat spam. In 2003 a spammer could use a content gnerator to generate thousands of pages, points some high PR links or spam some blogs, and achive high, long term ranking. The spammer would then reap thousands of dollars from various affiliate programs.
Now there are thousands of spammers from all over the world using content gnerators. In addition google is banning spammish sites or cloaked sites indiscriminately. This makes it much more difficult for most blackhatters to gain an egde.
Dot edu spamming is an example of a blackhat method that has become oversaturated. Litterally there are thousands of spammers using highly sophisticated scripts, spamming numerous university message boards and forums. Trying to compete with these spammers is next to impossible. Since the barrier to entry is so low anyone can set up a blackhat opperation and start spamming. Subsequently, your edu spam will be drowned out by everyone elses. Only ten sites can rank on the first page of google or msn, but there are thousands of spammers spamming thousands of sites. Also colleges are becoming more vigilant for spam and have intrduced additional moderation for forums and message boards.
Overall, while there is a lot of money to be made in blackhat don’t get your hopes up. And don’t expect to find the answer on forums either. Those who are highly proficient in blackhat aren’t going to spill the beans so you will have to learn backhat on your own terms. My advice though is to target easy, less competitve keywords. Viagra and Cialis may generate high commissions but ranking for those keywords is extremely difficult. You are better off making a little money with less competitive keywords than none.
Dispelling the hype behind domaining
Did you hear the recent stroy about the chinese guy making $23 million dollars a year with hit portfolio of domains?
Or the Swedish domainer who sold his domain name portfolio for $50 million?
Stories about seemingly average people making huge fortunes with domains occasionally crop up the major newspapers and internet forums create an enormous fury of discussion. The reader’s usual response to such stories is “Maybe I can register some domains and make a nice fortune”. Well um good luck because you’re about four years too late. At this point domaining is generally a waste of time and money for several reasons.
The first reason is that all the generic one or tow word domains have already been registered. Believe it or not, all the three letter combinations (26^3*3 or 52728 domain names) of dotcoms, dotnest, and dotorgs were registered before 1998. By 2000 virtually every word in the Oxford dictionary under six characters had been registered. In addition, nearly all generic longer compound phrases such as cellphone.com have also been registered. On average, generic domain names of dotcom or dotnet extensions carry substantially more value than other types of domains which is why the demand for these names is so great and supply is so scarce.
As a result of the scarcity of generic domain names and a renewed interest in domaining the price for domains has skyrocketed in the past four years following the dotcom shakeout of 2001-2002. When the dotcom bubble imploded millions of quality domain names expired and opportunistic domainers swooped in and registered those domain names. Generic domain names were selling in 2002-03 for a fraction of their value just a few years ago before the dotcom shake out. As internet commerce rebounded in 2004 the price for domains names surged and subsequently it become financially difficult for domain speculators to purchase quality domains. It isn’t uncommon for a short, one word domain name to sell for tens of thousands of dollars, or even more.
Making matters worse is that there are vastly more domain name speculators now than ever before. Domainers all over the world use sophisticated programs to immediately register expired domain names as well as engage in domain kiting. Domain kiting is the practice of registering thousands of domain names in bulk of various keyword combinations in the hope that a few of them will garner type in traffic. The domain names that fail to receive type in traffic are discarded before the grace period ends so the kiter will only have to pay for the domains that are profitable.
To give you an idea of how rampant domain name speculating has become, the day of the IPhone launch 425 Iphone related domain names were registered.
(I’ll finish the rest of this article later. Just wanted to get something out there.)
What makes a good blog post?
What kind of blog posts do readers want?
This is a difficult question. On one hand readers want useful content, but they also want to learn some thing new or completely unexpected. Blogging about how to install wordpress is an example of useful content, but since that information is readily available such an entry won’t attract much reader interest.
But on the other hand, I can’t reveal all my methods for making money online because that might threaten my income. I could blog about an uber BH (blackhat) method that is making me thousands of dollars a month but if dozens of people copy it will it work as well? Probably not. But will that blog entry garner more attention than the wordpress one? You bet.
This is the dilema a lot of internet/seo/marketing bloggers face.
Instead of blogging about my personal life or specific methods of making money online I prefer to blog about my commentary and insights regarding the internet marketing scene as a ‘fly on the wall’.
When I create a post such as “Why making money online sucks” it is designed to get your attention and stir discussion. Does making money online suck? Maybe it does for some people, maybe it doesn’t for others, but you see how it provokes a reaction? That is the intent.
A good blog post should open people’s mind to new possibilities and perspectives; not reiterate whats already known.
That way I can still get readers attention and interest by creating provocative, tantalizing posts, without having to reveal any of my trade secrets. It is the perfect middle ground.
The slow demise of Bluehatseo
The demise of bluehatseo continues. For some reason the site no longer loads and it has been a month since he posted any SEO content. Yes a month, and I am not joking. A cached version of bluehatseo shows the last ‘content’ post was made in July 31st. There was an update on August 16th promising ‘new stuff’ but it hasn’t materialized yet.
Bluehatseo is arguably one of the most popular SOE blogs around and now it looks like it is defunct. No more posts, no more content, and now the site is down.
Did Eli make lots of money from his SQUIRT submission tool? Yep, and it coincides with the downfall of his blog. It is as if he took the money and ran. I have nothing against making money, but it isn’t considerate to take peoples money and then simply drop the ball.
My belief is that bluehatseo was originally created for the purpose of eventually marketing an expensive SEO product to naive, gullible newbies. Once that goal was achieved there would be no need to continue updating the blog. I know this sounds pessimistic but since the squirt tool was released the quality of the blog has declined a lot.
If there are new consistant updates I’ll retract my opinion, but for now it stands where it is.
Why am I picking on bluehatseo? One reason is because it isn’t fair how a blog that is updated so infrequently can still have SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO many readers and so much positive reception. I add content every day to my blog and hardly anyone reads it. Eli could write the most trivial of posts like “I picked my nose this morning” and it would probably get 40 replies. Meanwhile I post some tips on getting traffic that may only get four reads and zero comments.