Recently everyone has been talking primarily about content marketing and pearly white hat techniques. While I do think these methods are the safest route to take, they’re not the only ones that work. It’s important to know about various practices, even ones you don’t intend on ever using. You can gain insight into what your competitors are doing, get a better understanding of how the algorithm works, and learn how to fix issues if someone comes to you from a previous search marketing agency.
I’m referring primarily to grey hat techniques. These are techniques that can give you a slight advantage, but may not follow Google’s guidelines 100%. This means there could be some risk involved, albeit a low one. These are not to be confused with black hat techniques, which can give you an even greater competitive edge, but carry a very large risk.
Here are some grey hat techniques that I know about and continue to work to this day.
Grey Hat Link Building Techniques
- Give your product to bloggers to review
- Redirect old domains to yours
- Offer bloggers a donation to a charity of their choice in exchange for a link
This is pretty straight forward. You can reach out to bloggers and ask them to review your product. They’re usually eager to accept, since everyone likes free stuff. However, since you’re giving an incentive, it’s possible for it to be considered a paid link.
This works better than it should for pages targeting less competitive terms. You can hit up sites like Name Jet and purchase niche related domains that have backlinks pointing to them. You can then redirect those domains to a new page your trying to promote.
This is another one that could be considered a paid link depending on who you ask. Instead of offering a physical or monetary incentive to bloggers, offer to donate to a charity related to their interest. This works especially well on blogs “with a cause” for example, blogs that raise awareness or eco-friendly blogs.
Grey Hat Design Techniques
- Moving content with CSS
- Cloaking content elements behind tabs
- Linking internally through unusual elements
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 don’t harm the usability.
This is similar to above, but with one big difference. The content isn’t visible when you first land on the page. Instead, you can put several tabs or a “more info” button which will show the content when clicked. This way robots will see the content (which is great for rankings), but users have to click to see it; allowing you to optimize for conversion instead. While this does seem like black hat cloaking, since the buttons are functional and the content isn’t fully hidden, it doesn’t break guidelines. However, It’s still a very sneaky and frowned upon tactic.
This is another sneaky one that can be done various ways. Most commonly, it’s done through a separate tab like the cloaking content mentioned above. For example, you can do a “more services” tab and link to several of your own pages. However, you can take this one step further and turn selections, such as drop down menus, into links. This way the serve a functional purpose and don’t look like links, but they will still pass juice.
Grey Hat Content Techniques
- Creating a separate page for each keyword
- Elaborate merge text or spun content
- Creating separate microsites for each niche
This is one that can really be beaten to death as long as you have the patience to write the content for it. You can create a new page for each keyword you’re trying to target, keep it off your navigation, but make it crawlable. This way you’re not harming usability, but you can pull in some traffic from long tail keywords. I’ve seen this done with everything from a few thousand pages to a quarter million pages. I would never recommend doing anything like this, but if you do, make sure to release the pages out slowly (a few thousand pages a month) so no spam filters are triggered.
This goes hand in hand with the method above. You should uniquely write the content for every page even if it’s several thousands of pages. However, well done merge text and spun content do still work. Yes, even after panda. The thing you need to keep in mind is the more pages your using this type of content on, the bigger risk you’re taking. A bot spitting out a few hundred pages of content has a low risk of duplication. However, when you make that several thousand, the chances increase dramatically.
Microsites are no secret. They have been abused in every way imaginable. However, I will say that the most benefit I’ve 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 site.
Something you have to be wary of with this is your local listings. If several websites are using the same phone number and address, it can screw up your places listings. You can resolve this in various ways, including using images instead of text on the microsites.