White Hat = Genuine web sites made by genuine people not necessarily for financial gain though built for longevity.

Black Hat = Mainly spam sites full of junk content and ads. Short life span but designed to produce high income during their mayfly life.

Grey Hat = Read on ...

Black Hat v White Hat a true story from a client.

So there I was slogging away 24/7 making a great site crammed with pages upon of useful content. Each page carefully SEO crafted. Navigation, hyperlinks and all those wondrous inclusions on such a 'white hat' site. After optimisation, it was verified, sitemaped and sent to all major search engines and scheduled to an auto submit SEO programme. (WebCEO - its totally free and the best)

Brilliant. Fantastic I thought. So happy I was until came the question a few months later .... Er, where's da income?

That was a year ago and despite daily attention, adding new content, SEO tweaking and applying every 'white hat' trick in the book (and a few that were not), still the elusive money failed to materialise. Advertisers were simply not interested so we joined Commission Junction, Trade Doubler and others like them and placed affiliate ads.

Bear in mind that by now, we had a five year old established domain name, a site that had been active for six months, excellent content spread over hundreds of pages and a Google PR of 5. But the big money still failed to materialise. Sure, the affiliates ads were producing some income, but even that was a task as each ad needed to be experimented with for performance. While one ad on a particular page may earn money, it does not follow true the same ad on another page will do likewise. (Allways remember to place ad's in the 'golden zone', top left corner and side)

By four months ago, that site was making around £800 month in commissions. Now some of the small thinkers may consider £200 per week a nice little earner and after all, spend another year of unadulterated hard work day and night and walla - another site making £200 week. Yes that's true and after 10 years if you haven't died from too many late nights of work, too much coffee or heart attack - and - you still have a family that remembers what you look like, you may get a chance to enjoy the £10,000 month income. Which of course by then with inflation and enhanced desires is no longer worth enough and, all those sites needing your daily attention!. And so it goes on.....

Quite frankly, I do not have 10 years of energy for such a project demanding so much work and even if I did, I would want be looking at zero's on the end of the figures above.

And that was my big realisation. What I was doing was going to take too long to achieve and still would not provide the income level I desired to reach. So, exactly four months ago I changed things. Taking all the useful tips and info gleamed over years of involvement within the 'white hat' industry, I started mapping a new plan of attack that required close examination of the 'black hat' industry.

Black Hat the short lived solution:

The big problem with 'black hat' is that most of the sites are full of rubbish. How it works is this; You auto make pages around keywords specifically designed for search engines and in particular, Google. The pages have no real readable value to any visitor to the site, just a bunch of keywords splattered around and padded out in semi-legible style. This is all done using one of the many auto site makers floating around like RSSGM etc, which will scrape content from the web and mash it all up. The advantage seen by 'black hatters' is that one can make a site with 100's of thousands of such gibberish pages in the hope that some will make it to search engines and some of the Google ads will be clicked on by the innocently lured visitor. And, I can assure you that the system works! There are some operatives that make £1000's a day with this technique. The down side is they have to constantly buy domain names and keep churning out an ever increasing number of pages each day just to keep pace with the major search engines banning their sites each day. They are lucky if a site lasts 3 months before being purged from the search listing databases, some bank on just a few weeks before the sites are banned. But they still manage to make some serious, and I mean serious money.

Example; say one site with ten thousand pages will last for say 10 weeks, during which time it will provide an average revenue of $10 week for it's ten week life span That's $100. Now you take this working formulae and duplicate it ten, a hundred or thousands of times. So basically with 'black hat', to make the $1000's per day you need to make millions of pages per day. Quite a few are doing it, but not for long as the search engine bots are getting clever and learning fast how to spot these spam sites and delete them. Most 'black hat' sites are easily spoted with little difficulty. They will have one or all of the following:-
Duplicated content spread across pages on each site and other sites generated by similar methods.
Glorified repeated article pages.
Nonsense sentencing or grammar.
Same or very similar templates.
Duplicated meta keywords, content or title.
Same inclusions or placeholders.
Same default images and names.
Same IP address.
No physical html pages.
No linked folder system.
Virtual sub domains.
And believe it or not, using the default settings of the generator programme which is like saying to the search bot. Hey! Junk Site Here!
Or even a simple IP look up that says Mr X has tens of thousands of domain names - put them all in the sandbox please!
As you see, it would not take a rocket expert to quickly add a couple of 'exclusions' to the standard Google bot. Immediately identifying a lot of black hat sites.

Grey Hat The Middle Way

So now enter the new era of 'grey hat' technology.
All of the above problems and more can be addressed by use of common sense and thinking outside the box. Grey hat takes the best of both worlds black and white, producing a virtually white hat site experience to the visitor while using selected black hat techniques to speed up the whole process of site and money making.
With grey hat, the site structure should normally be between 200 to 2000 pages contained within several directories and/or subdirectories. While each page can be automatically generated, its content will only be as good a the source its extracted from. Here is where you need some software to extract, import or manufacture articles which are automatically imported into the template. Everything imported should be as original as possible and be perfectly themed to the selected keywords both in content and adverts. Unlike Black Hat, the content or articles should be of unique quality. Even to the extent of encouraging a visitor to return.

To achieve the above takes some dedicated work. Even so, armed with a suitable array of available php scripts and utilities, anyone can build an immense grey hat site that is perfectly structured with several sub domains in hours instead of months.
All you need to supply is a good content and keyword source.
All you actually need to build is a good template. If you get these three right and put it all on auto pilot, you are on your way to some financial success.

by Charles Levie