Grey Hat SEO Techniques That Work
Recently everyone that has been talking primarily about the content marketing and pearly white hat techniques. While I doing i used to think these kinds of methods are the safest route to take they are not the only ones that work. It is important to know about various practices even ones you do not intend on ever using. You can gain insight into what are your competitors were doing get a better understanding, that how the algorithm works and has to learn how to fix the issues if someone comes to you from a previous search marketing agency.
I am referring primarily to Grey Hat Techniques. These are techniques that can give you a slight advantages, but may not follows the Googles guidelines 100%. This means that there could be the some risk involved albeit a low one. These are not to be confused with the black hat techniques which can give you an even greater competitive edges but that carry the very large risk.
There are some of the grey hat techniques that here we used to know about it and then how continue to work to this day.
Grey Hat Link Buildings Techniques
Give your product to bloggers to review
This is pretty straight forward. You can reach out to bloggers and ask them to review your products. They are usually eager to accept since everyone likes free stuff. However, since you are giving an incentives, it is possible for it to be considered a paid link.
Redirect the old domains to yours
This works better than it should for pages targeting less competitive terms. You can hit up sites like Name Jet and purchase niches related domains that have been a backlinks pointing to them. You can then redirect those domains to the new pages of your trying to promote.
Offer bloggers a donation to a charity of their choice in exchange for a link
This is another one that could be considered a paid link depending on who you ask. Instead of offering a physical or monetary incentives to the bloggers offer to donate to a charity related to their interest. This works especially well on blogs “with a cause” for example the blogs that raise awareness or eco-friendly blogs.
The Grey Hat Design Techniques
Moving content with CSS
This one can be a little tricky. Basically, you want to write the code of a site to where the content is as close to the top as possible and then use CSS to make the content appear lower on the page. The thought behind this is since the content is at the top it will be one of the first things Google crawls and thus giving it more “weight”. Then you can push the content down with CSS visually so you do not harm the usability.
Cloaking content elements behind tabs
This is similar to above but with one big difference. The content is not visible when you first land on the page. Instead you can put several tabs or more info button which will show the content when clicked. This way robots will see the contents which is great for rankings, but the users have to click to see it; allowing you to optimize for conversions instead. While this does seem like black hat cloakings since the buttons are functional and the content is not fully hidden and it does not break guidelines. However, It is still very sneaky and frowned upon tactic.
Linking internally through unusual elements
This is the another sneaky one that can be done various ways. Most commonly, it is done through a separate tab like the cloaking contents that is mentioned above. For examples, you can do a “more services” that the tab and link to several of your own pages. However you can take this one step further and then turn the selections, such as drop down menus into links. This way the serve a functional purpose that do not look like links but they will still pass juice.
Grey Hat Contents Techniques
Creating a separate pages for each keyword
This is one that can really be a beaten to death as long as you have the patience to write the content for it. You can create a new pages for each keyword you are trying to targets and keep it off your navigations but make it crawlable. This way you are not harming usabilities but you can pull in some of the traffics from long tail keywords. I have seen this done with everything from a few thousand pages to a quarter million pages. I would never recommends doing anything like this but if you do and make sure to the release and the pages out slowly a few thousand pages a month so no spam filters are triggered.
Elaborate merge text or spun content
This goes hand in hand with the method above. You should uniquely write the content for every page even if it is several thousands of the pages. However well done merge text and spun content do still work. Yes even after panda that The thing you need to keep in mind is the more pages your using this type of content on your page and the bigger risk you are taking. A bot spitting out a few hundred pages of content has a low risk of duplication. However when you make that several thousands that the chances increases dramatically.
Creating the separate microsites for each niche
Microsites are no secret. They have been abused in every way imaginable. However It will say that the most benefit I have seen gained from them is splitting them up by niche for local services. For example a law firm having one site for their divorce services and then another for personal injury. This allows you to focus on specific areas for each sites.
Something you have to be wary of with this is your local listings. If several websites are using the same phone number and addresses it can screw up your places listings. You can resolve this in various ways including using images instead of text on the microsites.
I am referring primarily to Grey Hat Techniques. These are techniques that can give you a slight advantages, but may not follows the Googles guidelines 100%. This means that there could be the some risk involved albeit a low one. These are not to be confused with the black hat techniques which can give you an even greater competitive edges but that carry the very large risk.
There are some of the grey hat techniques that here we used to know about it and then how continue to work to this day.
Grey Hat Link Buildings Techniques
Give your product to bloggers to review
This is pretty straight forward. You can reach out to bloggers and ask them to review your products. They are usually eager to accept since everyone likes free stuff. However, since you are giving an incentives, it is possible for it to be considered a paid link.
Redirect the old domains to yours
This works better than it should for pages targeting less competitive terms. You can hit up sites like Name Jet and purchase niches related domains that have been a backlinks pointing to them. You can then redirect those domains to the new pages of your trying to promote.
Offer bloggers a donation to a charity of their choice in exchange for a link
This is another one that could be considered a paid link depending on who you ask. Instead of offering a physical or monetary incentives to the bloggers offer to donate to a charity related to their interest. This works especially well on blogs “with a cause” for example the blogs that raise awareness or eco-friendly blogs.
The Grey Hat Design Techniques
Moving content with CSS
This one can be a little tricky. Basically, you want to write the code of a site to where the content is as close to the top as possible and then use CSS to make the content appear lower on the page. The thought behind this is since the content is at the top it will be one of the first things Google crawls and thus giving it more “weight”. Then you can push the content down with CSS visually so you do not harm the usability.
Cloaking content elements behind tabs
This is similar to above but with one big difference. The content is not visible when you first land on the page. Instead you can put several tabs or more info button which will show the content when clicked. This way robots will see the contents which is great for rankings, but the users have to click to see it; allowing you to optimize for conversions instead. While this does seem like black hat cloakings since the buttons are functional and the content is not fully hidden and it does not break guidelines. However, It is still very sneaky and frowned upon tactic.
Linking internally through unusual elements
This is the another sneaky one that can be done various ways. Most commonly, it is done through a separate tab like the cloaking contents that is mentioned above. For examples, you can do a “more services” that the tab and link to several of your own pages. However you can take this one step further and then turn the selections, such as drop down menus into links. This way the serve a functional purpose that do not look like links but they will still pass juice.
Grey Hat Contents Techniques
Creating a separate pages for each keyword
This is one that can really be a beaten to death as long as you have the patience to write the content for it. You can create a new pages for each keyword you are trying to targets and keep it off your navigations but make it crawlable. This way you are not harming usabilities but you can pull in some of the traffics from long tail keywords. I have seen this done with everything from a few thousand pages to a quarter million pages. I would never recommends doing anything like this but if you do and make sure to the release and the pages out slowly a few thousand pages a month so no spam filters are triggered.
Elaborate merge text or spun content
This goes hand in hand with the method above. You should uniquely write the content for every page even if it is several thousands of the pages. However well done merge text and spun content do still work. Yes even after panda that The thing you need to keep in mind is the more pages your using this type of content on your page and the bigger risk you are taking. A bot spitting out a few hundred pages of content has a low risk of duplication. However when you make that several thousands that the chances increases dramatically.
Creating the separate microsites for each niche
Microsites are no secret. They have been abused in every way imaginable. However It will say that the most benefit I have seen gained from them is splitting them up by niche for local services. For example a law firm having one site for their divorce services and then another for personal injury. This allows you to focus on specific areas for each sites.
Something you have to be wary of with this is your local listings. If several websites are using the same phone number and addresses it can screw up your places listings. You can resolve this in various ways including using images instead of text on the microsites.
Nice blog.
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