UK Expert SEO

Affiliate Black Hat vs White Hat. I see my old acquaintance Jason Duke has been sharing his thoughts on ‘black hat’ SEO for affilaites (Jason is very good at this stuff by the way). I have said for a while now, that Google sees affilaite income as theirs. (Get rid of affiliates and merchants have to advertise with Google) Hence the war on affilaites where they are atttacking thin affiliate sites which have not a lot of content to offer…. for now.

The assertion is that 80% of traffic to bingo, casino and poker sites are from blackhat efforts. I guess the 1st quesiton is what do you call black hat? Is that any deviation from the Google webmaster guidelines? If so, then thats a reasonable figure. But all things are relative as you would see if you read this real blackhat hard core approach to getting ranked. This level of activity probably gets about 30% bingo, casino, poker sites ranked for secondary terms.
What are secondary terms? In these areas (casino, poker bingo) there are very few keywords that make money, in other words they have a very short tail. So once you’re outsitde of (forinstance) casino, online casino, casino UK, then you are in the secondary and 3rd level keywords where spammers rule, but where the pickings are not great. The lack of economic incentive means a restriction in spammers efforts.

And since Google treat different verticles differently, it means they will probably hand pick those top sites for casino, poker and bingo. I believe the reason they do this, is to prevent a spam arms war which would go on to contaminate large chunks of the internet.

The reality is that black hat works, but not like it used to. The cleaver money is on building love of a site and being clever at optimising it efficiently. I know, since I’m lucky enough to be responsible for one of the great new affilaite success stories… and no I haven’t spammed, I’ve just helped things along. ;-) 

Link: Affiliates4u article