White Hat is Pointless When..
A third party can influence your sites rank in a negative way.
After spending some time snooping around in a black hat forum, coupled with Google’s recent fuck-ups I’m beginning to wonder if continuing to build white hat content sites is an utterly pointless endeavour that can, and will, lead to disappointment and misery.
Asides from waiting out the sandbox release (which may never happen despite links, updates, quality factors etc..), there is the fact anyone with a little know-how of the dark side can literally fuck your website out of Google using simple techniques that apparently work like a charm.
Picture the scenario: You build a great content website, updated it daily with good content that costs you hundreds of dollars/month, garner plenty of healthy links and over the period of a year you managed to built a large resourceful site that Google accepted as a quality site, releasing you from the sandbox and you begin to enjoy a nice income from the site.
Now that you’re riding high in the search results for all of your targeted keywords, your competition takes note of your presence, some of which also dabble in black hat practices, or know of people who do, and are able to knock your website out of Google.. and there’s literally nothing you can do to stop them.
A few weeks or months after enjoying the lucrative earnings your sites traffic plummets and your earnings bomb to a few dollars/day, receiving only traffic from MSN and a handful from Yahoo.
It’s enough to make you think “fuck it, if you can’t beat them join them”, not to knock your competitors out of search results but simply so you have a back-up and another revenue stream that isn’t so reliant upon steady long-term rankings in Google which is any content sites bread and butter of traffic and earnings.
Remember: Google doesn’t give a fuck about you or your livelihood and third parties shall always be able to fuck with your website while Google state “there’s almost nothing anyone can do to affect your rankings”.
I’m feeling very pissed off with Google right now. If it isn’t for the de-indexing or the not re-indexing plenty of quality pages, fuckin’ up my page titles or handing the Chief Engineer a 5-week ‘vacation’ in a critical time.. and now I’m sat here wondering if the Google Toolbar that I have installed is capable of sending all of this right back to Google where they could easily spot who I am, what websites I own, which AdSense account to pull.. simply put, I don’t fucking trust Google anymore and I resent them.
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Learn anything useful from my ramblings? Shout me a cold one and make my day.
Well said!
The line which says that a competitor could do “almost” nothing to hurt my rankings disappointed me. That’s true that someone with black hat know how can hurt my site also.
And why only the toolbar, they offer mozilla as their own product…
Wonder what they will come up next to track on my activity with.
Comment by Website designer — June 29, 2006 @ 8:34 pm
Fucking great rant. See you at Syndk8.
Comment by pilkster — June 30, 2006 @ 10:36 pm
Definitely have to agree, makes you think.
Comment by Colleen — July 1, 2006 @ 6:53 pm
Awesome article, we are always looking for new ways to get a jump on the competition!
Comment by CLLC — July 1, 2006 @ 7:12 pm
[…] After Google’s recent bad data push that resulted in 5 billion spam pages in the index, a lot of webmasters seem to be accepting the fact that Google is bust and seem to be looking to the dark side of SEO, including me. I registered at syndk8 and have been reading up on all the methods used. […]
Pingback by Georgie Casey » Blog Archive » Google Bowling — July 3, 2006 @ 12:11 pm
White hat is pointless when one company has the monopoly on search, and can’t cope with spam, and you derive most of your traffic from search. It’s also pointless if all the major search engines are fighting a losing battle with spam.
It’s only when search engines are capable of some sort of AI to rank pages, that we will be anywhere near clear of this problem. There just isn’t enough computing power and thought being thrown at these issues.
Comment by Ros — July 3, 2006 @ 9:45 pm
Yeah, Google really is the next Microsoft. They pretty much run the internet at this point, which is a bad thing. And in regards to the black hat SEO , I agree, if you can’t beat them, join them.
Comment by Jeff Quindlen — July 22, 2006 @ 7:36 pm