[HN-Discussion] Competitor is successful with black hat SEO

Sven

Might be interesting for others as well, thats why I put a link here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13913228

redrays

Good share and gotta love the guy doing seo for a payday loans company complaining about OTHER people doing black hat seo

Anth20

Funny how they all say blackhat, and they all create their own backlinks... xD

spunko2010

Ah, the predictable example of using Rapgenius/genius.com really fucks me off. Firstly, they would never have been caught if someone hadn't reported them - Google gets thousands of reports of people doing this every week and ignore 99.999% of them (and many thousands more do it and get away with it without ever being reported). Google decided to "make an example" of genius.com for PR purposes. Once rapgenius stopped doing it and "apologised", Google then removed the penalty. How many everyday webmasters would be so lucky? Very few. Google takes months to reply if at all in SEC.

Despite the hot air, the only way for a webmaster to get anywhere in Google continues to be either a) be exceptionally lucky or b) use less-than-honest methods. Once you have generated enough cash via BH methods you can then move onto other "grey hat" methods like buying PR and paying people to write about you, etc.