Grey Hat SEO: Which tactic is riskiest?

July 21, 2015: Didit recently solicited input from a group of experts on the topic of “Grey Hat SEO,” a set of optimization tactics occupying the middle ground between “black” (expressly prohibited by the search engines) and “white” (risk-free and ethically unimpeachable) methods.

Grey Hat SEO is fascinating because the tactics used are heterogeneous, fast-changing, and often innovative. There is no canonical list of Grey Hat tactics (the term “Grey Hat SEO” doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page), which further lends confusion and mystery to the actual business usage.

Here’s what our virtual panel of SEO experts revealed when we asked them about the riskiest Grey Hat SEO tactic they were currently aware of “in the wild,” why these tactics persist, and how best to communicate to clients the possible risks and rewards of using them.

“The riskiest white/grey hat tactic that I know of (and also quite controversial) would have to be guest blogging. It’s controversial in the sense that it can be both a white-hat or black-hat tactic — depending on how it’s done. For example, guest blogging a relevant topic, on an authoritative site (with high, relevant metrics such as DA, PA Trust/Citation Flow), with a generic anchor text is definitely walking the low-risk profile. However, when tactics get into things like spun text, duplicated content and exact-matched anchor text — the risks become much greater.”

— Anthony De Guzman , SEO Specialist, Saatchi & Saatchi

“One risky grey hat link building technique is purchasing links, or more specifically, becoming an event/organizational sponsor for the sole purpose of building back links. One way a company can help clients evaluate this tactic is by ensuring the event or organization is topically relevant while simultaneously building out additional, above-board links to ensure link diversity within the client’s back link profile. Sponsorship opportunities were around long before SEO and link building and therefore occur naturally. Given this, sponsorships cannot be targeted by the search engines in the same sense that say, directory submissions can be.

Risky grey hat tactics in the wild include: purchasing sidebar advertisements that do not implement the Nofollow attribute, building out an affiliate/referral program that does not implement the Nofollow attribute, and sending out products for review opportunities so as to gain Dofollow links.”

— Brett Bastello, Link Building Specialist, Inseev Interactive

“The riskiest white/grey tactics at present are probably guest blogging and article spinning. Guest blogging is an entirely legitimate way to raise your influence and brand awareness, but it became a favorite means of directing commercial anchor links back to the author’s domain. That led to Matt Cutts, Head of Web Spam at Google, to say in January 2014 that ‘guest blogging is done.’ What he meant, of course, was using guest posts as means to build un-natural links was done. That remains a risky process, and sites are still getting punished for it. But writing posts for authoritative sites, with just a brand link back to your domain, remains entirely valid.”

— James Rice, Head of SEO, Picked.ai

“The riskiest grey hat tactic that I am aware of is not using naked URLs or Nofollows in press releases. Google has made it clear (and many PR distribution services have followed suit), that these links are spam unless the URL is naked and or the anchor linked URL is Nofollow. But  there are countless PR distribution services that do not adhere to this guideline, which could result in duplicate content with do-follow links being syndicated across hundreds of channels, resulting in a lengthy manual disavow process if penalties are assessed.”

— Michael Lazar, Director of Online Marketing | Growth Hacker, TrueShip Shipping Software

“Link building can be a website’s best friend or worst enemy. Building lots of links usually get sites ranked quickly but it’s risky. If you build too many links it can hurt your SEO. Its best to slowly build links and monitor your ranking to avoid over optimizing your link building campaign.”

— Brett Bastian, CEO, Blast Moba

“Duplicate content. There is a fine line between having keywords and overusing them, and similarly the same line exists for content as a whole. Many companies run the risk of being penalized on SERPs for having this kind of repetitive content because it is viewed as clogging up the information superhighway. On the other hand, if a business legitimately has services or products available in multiple locations and they need a website in those locations to represent them and those products / services then this form of content strategy is a necessity.”

— Alexander Ruggie, Public Relations Director, Milestone SEO

“When it comes to White Hat/Grey SEO, some of the riskiest techniques include:

1. Article Spinning: Repurposing old content is great, but if all you do is rewrite a few words than consider your content spun. Article spinning may save you time, but duplicate content can put you in Google’s penalty box.

2. Link Exchanges:  Back-links are important, but don’t pay to play. Don’t participate in link exchange programs either. It’s about quality over quantity, and Google will wind up dismissing large numbers of links with a lower domain authority.”

— Michael Peggs, CEO, Marccx Media

“The riskiest tactic today is actually to artificially build links. Because the term “link building” per se is misleading. You shouldn’t build links, rather you should acquire them naturally. So based on the risk profile of the customer, I’d say that guest posting still works but is very risky in a sense if done wrong, e.g. contacting the wrong sites, irrelevant to your niche and focusing on the wrong metrics, e.g. Page Rank or DA/PA (which can be easily faked).

Broken link building is very hot these days. That means you contact website owner of broken links on their website and replace those links with a working link from your client. If done correctly this can be very powerful. But if done wrong you can be penalized by Google in future updates.

Overall I feel that people should think less about tactics but rather strategic when it comes to SEO. Who can they partner with and what brings the most value to their customer is generally a good place to start to acquire natural back links.”

— Mauricio Prinzlau, Business Development, Cloudwards.net

“Although the fear and paranoia surrounding guest posting has receded somewhat since the release of Penguin 3.0 late last year, I still consider this the most risky SEO tactic. Google’s stated goal with Penguin was to get rid of “unnatural” and “manipulative” link building. Guest posting (when done carelessly) is exactly that – an artificial attempt to influence a site’s rankings.

This is not to say that we disregard guest posting – in fact, it’s one of the top techniques we recommend to our clients! The way we go about it, though, is always focused, controlled and in-line with Google’s stated aims. This means we avoid guest blogging on low quality websites (i.e. below Page Rank 1 and over 500,000 Alexa); we avoid churning out lots of over-optimized, poor quality content; and we don’t always link on the money anchor text. We also, obviously, never pay to have our articles published.

Guest blogging has to form part of the overall content marketing strategy, and links should never be an end in themselves. There first of all needs to be lots of relevant, valuable, and ‘link-worthy’ content on the client’s website (in order for the link in the guest post to appear natural). In addition, in order to avoid being penalized, we always priorities quality over quantity, i.e. we prefer to guest post once on the best quality websites, rather than 10 times on spammy ones.”

— Luke Rees, Marketing Lead, AccuraCast

“I have a rather random risky strategy for you. There is no question that Google has some sort filter if too many of your links have the same anchor text. For this example, let’s use ‘dog collars’. If your link profile shows 80% of your links have the anchor text ‘dog collars’ Google rightly looks at this as being unnatural, as standard linking practices would vary the anchor text far more often. However, over the years, I have seen this as issue for exact match domains.

Using this same example, what if you owned the domain www.DogCollars.com <http://www.dogcollars.com/>? In normal ‘white hat’ link building you would be far more likely to build links with the anchor text of ‘dog collars’ since that is your domain, as compared to a site like www.ThePetSuperStore.com <http://www.thepetsuperstore.com/>. While having an exact match domain does give you a bit of a SEO advantage, it is an interesting disadvantage in link building, and I’ve seen many sites hit with a filter and lose rankings because Google feels as if the site is building links in an unnatural fashion when in reality it isn’t.”

— Bill Fish, President, ReputationManagement.com

“One of the most effective grey hat SEO tactics I’ve seen in recent years is creating private blog networks. This is the practice of creating a private network of high authority domains by buying high domain authority sites or snapping up high authority domains right as they expire, then
adding content to them and linking them back to your main site.

The key to private blog networks is to make them appear as natural as possible, and not creating an identifiable footprint that Google can detect. This means using multiple registrars, multiple registration identities, multiple CMSs, and mimicking natural linking patterns.

Creating a proper blog network takes a lot of work, and can be risky (if detected, Google can penalize/de-index your entire network) but can be an effective way to get a decisive edge in competitive niches or niches where high quality links are hard to come by.”

— Takeshi Young,  SEO Manager, Optimizely

“Grey hat tactics are very rare, due to the fact that if it is ‘risky’ by definition it is a black hat tactic. The most publicized grey hat tactic was denounced by Matt Cutts early in 2014 and was known as spammy guest blogging. Essentially, the concept of guest blogging was manipulated with content farms created in order to host blog posts that offered very little value to the user but provided a link within the article. It was in fact surprising at how long it took Google to announce and subsequently crack down on this issue as it is just a slightly more complex version of a link directory!”

— Simon Ensor, Managing Director, Yellowball

“One of the things that’s on the ‘edge’ of the white hat/grey hat balance is exact-match anchor text link building. Almost every SEO practitioner knows that exact match anchor text is an ingredient for a Google slap but without it, it’s a lot more difficult to rank competitively. So it’s very tricky to find the balance between how many exact-match anchor text links you really need vs. naked URLs vs. brand anchor text links vs. phrase-match anchor text links.

It’s like mixing a winning solution but you just don’t know exactly how much of each you should have in the formula. What we do is keep the exact match anchor text fairly low – less than 20% and then keep the brand and naked URLs on the majority of our links – around 80%. That somehow stabilizes our reputation with Google and it also enables us to rank efficiently form the link equity we’re getting from other sites.” 

— Sean Si, CEO and Founder, SEO Hacker

“The riskiest techniques: Link Building. Google has gone to great lengths to state that creating links for your website is against their guidelines yet without links websites do not rank. Many SEO companies have moved to pure link earning tactics however a majority are still invested in building links month on month. This is risky as Google’s Penguin algorithm is tasked with finding and nullifying any created links and its only getting better. We’ve moved to link earning.

Landing Pages: Due to the limitations imposed upon us by many clients a lot of website content is out of bounds. To circumvent this SEOs create dedicated landing pages for core keywords. These pages are often less than great and designed purely for search engines with little value to the users. We still employ this tactic however are working with clients to make them an integral part of the websites content and the best possible resource they can be.

Guest Blogging: The demise of My Blog Guest and other blogging networks have highlighted Google’s preference for earned links. Many SEOs still employ blogger outreach as part of their strategies however this typically involves putting your best content on someone else’s website. Again we prefer earning links by putting the best content on our clients website.”

— Mark Rushworth, Head of Digital Marketing, Blue Logic Digital

“Any link building technique is risky. If you are not earning links and only building them, you are at risk. But, the most risky tactics are those that are sold publicly by link builders on black hat forums. It important to inform your clients that there’s a chance to get hit by  Google if they are building links instead of earning them with whitehat seo.

If you can have a private underground blog network of High PR sites that you have hidden even from your spouse, then you might still be able to rank a couple of your websites for a few months until Google finally finds out about them. Good Luck.”

— Harshajyoti Das, CEO, Munmi IT Solutions LLP

I think that SEO-focused link bait pieces are becoming a bigger risk. While link bait isn’t always bad and remains a legitimate way of earning links, doing it from a purely SEO focus puts you at risk. If you’ve stumbled upon a ‘secret’ or a ‘loophole’, you’re probably thinking about SEO in a short-term way that’s going to hinder you and your clients in the long run.

— Shree Vaidya, Head of SEO, Engage Interactive

“A tactic would be to create buying guides around the product sub-categories or products themselves (e.g. men’s dress shirts) and build up links naturally and from promotion. After time, those guides will
outrank your products on broad keywords, use a rel canonical to pass the link value back to the product category (or product) or 301 redirect the guide and put the guide on a new URL to start fresh.

Yes, it’ shady, but it’s smart. If you want to go the clean/white route, then just use internal links to pass the link equity back to product-oriented pages. But the bottom line is, people love buying guides
and link to them like crazy.”

— Jordan Kasteler, Director of SEO, MWI