Black Hat Vs White Hat Authority Web 2.0 Link Building

Written by Jason Parker 5 Comments

Jason Parker's Internet Marketing Show

It’s good to keep up with how the black hatters out there are building links. However, they’re kind of wreckless and not in it for the longterm (for the most part). So if you’re a black hat authority link builder, you could get a bunch of traffic to a page within a certain time frame, then the traffic may come to a halt when Google comes along and slaps them across the face… with a baseball bat.

White hat authority link building is being in it for the long haul but still utilizing some of the resources black hatters use. Some people call it aggressive whitehat. My friend Bill McRea calls these kind of strategies “on the fringe.”

Basically instead of sitting back and expecting authority sites to link to you, you go out and get the links. And you grow a web of links between the sites. You’re contributing to the websites in a way Google likes to see, with quality content, but you also get the effects of having inbound authority links.

You can hire someone to do this for you daily or you can do it yourself. I pay a guy $15 a day to do it. He does a great job. He’s the same guy who writes ProIMer News.

First let’s look at what’s all the rage right now in the black hat SEO world, how they’re borrowing the authority of these extremely high PR sites…

Black Hat Link Wheels

These guys are taking high authority websites like Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly, Zimbio, and Quizilla and creating pages on them that link together in a wheel. For example, a Squidoo page links to the URL they’re trying to rank high and a Hubpages page, the Hubpages page links to the URL they’re trying to rank high and a Weebly page, the Weebly page links to the URL they’re trying to rank high and a Zimbio page, the Zimbio page links to the URL they’re trying to rank high and a Quizilla page, and finally the Quizilla page links to the URL they’re trying to rank high and the 1st Squidoo page.

So you can see in your mind how this creates a wheel of links between authority site pages. They all transfer link juice to eachother. Notice they’re not reciprocal linking. That would cancel out a lot of the link juice.

Right now this strategy is working like gangbusters for black hatters. However, I think link wheels can easily be detected by search engines and one of these days, I think they’ll possibly crack down it. If you want, feel free to ride it while you can.

So this might be a main strategy of a BH guy… 1) hi-jack a profile on an authority website (not by stealing, but just by creating an account) and turn it into an affiliate landing page for Viagra 2) create 5 link wheels with anchored LSI links and try to rank on the #1 page of Google for a competitive term dealing with Viagra. I’m not suggesting you do this (you can if you want, I don’t), but it’s just interesting how these guys manipulate search traffic and you can learn a lot from it. For example, this strategy proves web 2.0 authority sites are “where it’s at” right now.

Link wheels are like the effects of Neurolinker, except between authority web pages but the circle gets closed off with the last page linking to the first page.

But I think an aggressive white hat or on the fringe approach is more powerful for the longterm…

White Hat Authority Link Webs

I just came up with this term off the top of my head, so I have no idea if it’s been coined by anyone else or anything… It doesn’t come up in a Google search, so what the hay, let’s call this strategy creating Authority Link Webs. If you coined this term, just contact me and I’ll call it something else.

So you want to take advantage of these web 2.0 properties but in a not-so-obvious and also respectable way. You create quality content on these authority sites. You link them together randomly and not in a wheel. You also ping and bookmark each page.

You’re creating what looks more like a web in no particular order. This looks like natural linking. Also, you want to consider LSI in your anchor texts. Don’t just link with the same anchor text in every link. That wouldn’t be very natural and your site may get dinged by Google.

Plus instead of linking straight to your index page, link to various pages on your website. Links to pages on your site contribute to the overall link juice of your site. This looks most natural.

For example, you create a Squidoo Lens that links to one page on your site. You ping your Squidoo RSS feed and bookmark it to make sure it gets indexed in Google somewhere. Next you create a Hubpages Page linking to your index page and ping your Hubpages RSS feed and bookmark it. Next you create a Weebly page, bookmark it, and link it to your Squidoo Lens. Link a Quizilla page to your Squidoo Lens too. Point is… do it randomly instead of in a perfect circle. Inner-link web 2.0 properties but not in a so obvious way. To make it even more natural, start linking articles to your site pages and your web 2.0 pages.

The dude I outsource to creates one of these high authority web 2.0 pages for me each day, pings, bookmarks, and links them to eachother randomly. $15 a pop. He does a great job. If you want to go cheaper and do a little work, you can get uniques articles from Articles-Written, create the pages yourself, ping the RSS feeds with Pingomatic, and bookmark them with OnlyWire. Or just do it all yourself if you’re into that sort of thing.