Gray Hat SEO Tricks

What is grey hat seo? The term grey hat is used to categorize all the seo tricks out there that fall somewhere in-between white hat which is ethical, and black hat or non ethical. Using gray hat seo is all about the risk versus the reward of trying to rank well in the search engines to get traffic. Abusing them can have a negative effect on your website, but don’t carry the harsh penalties that black hat seo tricks would.

It’s also important to understand that many grey hat seo tricks wind up becoming black hat from over abuse. Tricks such as cloaking where you present two versions of your website, one for your visitors, the other for the search engines that are stuffed with keywords that they want to rank for. Or paid links where you pay the site owner of a higher rank site for a link are now considered full blown black hat tricks.

In the long run it’s always better to stick to ethical “white hat” seo techniques as much as possible to avoid being penalized or banned from the search engines. Obviously the last thing you want after you spent considerable time and money on a website is it to be crapped down the search rankings so far it’s never seen from again.

So what are some gray hat seo tricks?

If you do decide the risk is worth the reward here are a few gray hat seo tricks. Again I recommend you stick with keeping things ethical and on the level as much as possible.

1. Duplicate Content

I listed this one in my last post as a black hat seo trick, and for the most part it is. There are however circumstances where duplicate content is accepted by both search engines and visitors and that’s if it’s listed on resource sites. These are websites that act as an index of articles. Article sites such as Ezine for example fit into this category because their site allows visitors to re publish any article on their site (provided you follow the guidelines and copy it exactly including all links) Because Ezine is very strict about what they allow on their site which is monitored by editors Google and the other search engines trust them and allow content from their site to be spread everywhere.

This can provide a huge boost if your write popular articles, giving your original articles and your site more traffic.

2. Article spinning

This is a trick many internet marketers use to trick the search engines into thinking all of their content is 100 percent original. What this involves is taking your articles changing up the wording to form a new article or post that looks different from the original. This can be done through re-writing programs such as Magic Article Submitter (you have to pay for this one) or through sites such as Free Traffic System which submits your spun articles to other blogs to be published on their sites.

FYI I’ve used Free Traffic System in the past and I’ve noticed two things. The first is 99 percent of the blogs that pick up your spun articles are very low ranking. And that most are in countries you’ve probably never heard of…………….anyone else never heard of Moldova before?

3. Manipulating Sharing Sites

This is harder to do on the bigger sharing sites such as Stumbleupon, Reddit, and Digg. But for smaller less know sites like Delicious, Bebo, and Mister Wong (which is now a sharing site you have to pay to use, so I would completely ignore that one) it’s easier to get your content featured. One common trick to manipulate these sites is to simply create multiple accounts and vote, thumb up, or whatever feature they have to get a higher ranking.

4. Paid reviews

This one can be either considered a grey hat seo trick or just another way to make money online. Sites like Pay Per post allow you to write reviews for advertisers. These reviews can range from products or services depending on the advertiser. The advertiser also gets a by default a link back to their site with the anchor text of their choosing. Either way if you’re looking to make some extra cash this might not be a bad thing to look into.

5. Power users

Another trick that borders on somewhere between gray hat seo and unethical is to pay a “power user”. A power user essentially is someone who has been on Digg, Stumbleupon or any other social networking, book marking, or any site that gets huge amounts of traffic. These are users who have been on these sites for years, have huge followings and get tonnes of hits. By “convincing” which means pay them, they promote and push your content giving them a boost in traffic and followers.

6. Automated Twitter/ Facebook followers

There are several programs out there that will automate your Twitter or Facebook accounts by sending out follow requests. For Twitter this means the more followers you have the more people will see your tweets and hopefully click on the links.

For Facebook these programs send out friend requests to get people added to your friend list. Once their added anything you post on Facebook will show up on their profile, which helps to promote your content.

There are lots of other grey hat seo tricks coming out all the time, just remember though that what’s considered gray hat now can easily become black hat later if you abuse it too much. If you’re new to SEO and want to try using grey hat seo, I recommend you first try with a trash site, or site you don’t care about, that way Google doesn’t ban your site.