The most lucrative markets in the Internet are well known to be the three P's, porn, pills and poker, we can categorize these are pharmeceuticals, gambling and pornography. It is estimated that almost 80% of traffic to these websites are from other websites using black hat SEO in order to draw in surfers from search engine results pages (SERPS), and then redirect them to a chosen website, whereupon should the surfer make a purchase then the refering webmaster would pocket a commission from the transaction. In many cases the affiliate website would continue to pay any commissions from any repeat purchases (or losses if from a gaming site.)
These markets are the most lucrative to a webmaster because they have the highest conversion rates. Even with a conversion rate of 0.5% and a website directing over 2000 surfers per day, the black hat SEO webmaster could pocket commissions for around 70 transactions per week, with many of these being repeat commissions such as monthly adult website subscriptions or repeat gambling losses. But the elite Black Hats had hundreds of thousands of pages in SERPS all bringing in tens of thousand of visitors per week. Because of this many black hat SEO webmasters became rich within a few short months, and other webmasters learning of their success also decided to change the color of their SEO hat, some with a great deal of success, others with lesser success but still with a success rate high enough to make it worthwhile as opposed to using white hat SEO methods. Thus within a few short years SERPS became filled with literally billions of pages of spam, creating huge problems for the search engines.
Because of search engine algorithms deciding on a websites position within SERPS, based upon popularity, (the number of other websites linking to that website, and the popularity of those pages that display the link), then black hat SEO webmasters would also scour the Internet for vulnerable places where he could post a link to his website. This concluded with many websites such as forums, blogs and guestbooks becoming filled with comment spam as black hat SEO webmasters jousted for position in SERPS, spending many hours finding ranked pages and posting links there to give their website popularity in the eyes of the search engines.
Search engines then started to develop more complex algorithms in an attempt to weed out all these spam pages, including analysis of the page content and their promotional behaviour - black hat webmasters evolved even more, search engines fought back, but by now the elite black hat SEO webmasters were designing websites and promoting them with stealth and presicion which was good enough to enable them to go undetected by the search engine algorithms.
Paul Williams - The rise of a Black Hat SEO
After being a white hat SEO for many years he became one of the many webmasters disillusioned with Internet failure and unable to compete with the big businesses who dominated SERPS for popular keywords and keyword phrases. Despite a lot of hard work, time and expense and even a lot of study about SEO, after many years hard work he could only manage a trickle of traffic to his websites via the search engines, a common problem amongst most people searching for Internet success.
Soon his study of SEO and his quest for success became a vocation, and he started to experiment with many websites and techniques in order to find out which ones worked the best. He started to tinkle about with some of his websites, adding in a few keywords and keyword phrases that were related to his site within the pages even though they didn't really fit into the content of the page, (now known as keyword stuffing) and after a few weeks he bagan to have some limited success as search engine traffic had almost trebled.
Because traffic has risen so much then he began to be less concerned about the quality of the content of his webpages, and before long he found himself creating pages specifically designed to attract search engine traffic without any real content. The content of the page would be just popular keywords and keyword phrases along with some content scraped from the internet in the form of snippets of other websites, making the pages look like some form of directory, a common practise amongst black hat SEO webmasters which is known as 'Data-mining', with the websites being called 'Scraper Sites"
As traffic started pouring in, soon he found he was making and promoting huge websites with tens of thousands of pages each. He could build and promote such a website within just a few days - and within weeks the traffic would be there in droves. Even after having many websites 'caught' by the search engine algorithms he continued to experiment and perfect his undetactable black hat SEO techniques to build and promote his websites. As one website became banned by search engines for breaking their guidelines then he would just build another !
Despite the huge success of many black hat webmasters, still many webmaster and SEO forums and SEO websites refuse to give any publicity to, or publish any news about black hat SEO and in most cases the only mention of black hat SEO on their website is to warn their visitors against it. Their way of dealing with such a huge part of the internet is just to brush it under the carpet.
The Future of Black Hat SEO
Search engine algorithms are now much more advanced in detecting spam pages and websites with little or no content, and many black hat SEO webmasters are calling it a day after having many of their websites banned by the search engines. However, because of the thousands of new black hat SEO websites appearing each day, search engines are still fighting a losing battle and in their desperate attempts to rid their indexes of spam, in many cases legitimate websites are being caught up in the algorithm and being banned for no fault of their own. It has now come to light that unscrupulous webmasters can effect the ranking of a competitors website by relating that website to black hat SEO practises, enabling a target website to be caught up in the algorithm and affect it in SERPS or even become banned by the search engines.
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