Black Hat Pay Per Click Techniques

Black hat PPC is rarely discussed in the Search Engine industry, especially not as much as black hat SEO Techniques, but we should be aware of black hat pay-per-click methods as it's possible your competitors could be applying them. In this post you will get to know how you can duplicate a competitor’s ad text to replace their ad by outbidding them.

Pay-per-click is a competitive process simply by design. And that is the reason why the people choose to use dirty tactics rather than having to pay the higher bid prices which is also have some biggest risks. Black hat PPC mostly consists of using flaws and weaknesses in systems such as Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter to your advantage.


Non-Compliant Ads
One such flaw is the lack of pre-moderation on the AdWords system, allowing changes that meet a set of automated rules to go live instantly 24/7. Unfortunately, the human side to moderation doesn’t seem to work 24/7, giving a time period in which non-compliant ads can be published.

One of many reasons affiliates use this technique is that it allows them to show a different display URL to the actual click-through URL on the ad. This means that over the weekend, their affilaiteredirect.com site can now appear to be amazon.com/music - resulting in a substantially increased CTR from the brand recognition.

You can use this trick in many different ways, as long as it doesn’t hit an automated rule such as trademark infringement. Bringing this to an in-house scenario, you may want to outbid your competitors on their brand terms or use ad copy that a human editor would normally decline. The key to doing this is to test what times and days an editor declines non-compliant copy, plus re-instating the original ad before the end of your blind-spot timeframe. (Some bid management tools can do this for you.)


Same Search Term Multiple Ads
A big restriction on most PPC networks is the inability to have multiple ads from one company displayed for the same search term. You may want to do this in order to advertise multiple products or to flood the ad space and push your competitors off the first page of the search results.

Getting around this restriction is a little trickier, as a new PPC account will be needed for each additional advert you wish to display. This could be achieved by creating a number of phantom companies with a unique bank account, credit card, and address, or you could get a little help from your friends. In either case, it’s often a good idea to use pre-paid credit cards so your phantom company or helpful friend never gets into debt. You’re then ready to start bidding, although be careful not to leave any footprints that associate the accounts to one another.

It’s best to use the first trick I mentioned so you can link directly through to your main site out-of-hours without fear of getting caught. You can also flood the search results for your competitors’ non-trademarked brand terms so they don’t have a single brand name PPC listing.

Its best not to be too evil toward your competitors though, as someone will eventually find out, and you may get reported to Google. Your best line of defense when this happens is to use your existing affiliate program (or create a fake one) and blames it all on a maverick affiliate of yours. (Remember to use different affiliate IDs for each ad’s click-through URL.)


Copying Competitor Ads
A final example of playing dirty is to copy a competitor’s ad (title, copy, and display URL), and run it on your account with a different click-through URL. As Google AdWords doesn’t allow duplicate ads, you can wipe your competitor from the paid search listings simply by using the same display URL. As long as you bid more than the competitor’s maximum bid, your campaign should replace theirs.

The user will be expecting to land on your competitor’s site when clicking through, so it’s best to create a landing page mentioning the competitor, perhaps in the form of a damning review, e.g., “Product A has been proven to be inferior to Product B...” If doing this on a large scale, try to do it on weekends; once again, so it’s harder for your competitor to monitor and analyze.


Remember, all these examples could risk your PPC account and should therefore be used with caution.

Link Baiting

Linkbaiting (link baiting, linkbait, link bait etc) is a term that has increasingly being used around the blogosphere.

What is Link Baiting?

A lot could said about it. So I’ll make just a few basic points to keep things simple.

The term linkbaiting is a one that seems to have surfaced over the past 12 or so months and that is used by webmasters to describe a variety of practices - all of which seek to generate incoming links to a website or blog from other sites.

It is actually a difficult term to be definative about as it covers a lot of different practices ranging from running awards or competitions, through to writing attacking posts on high profile bloggers in the hope of them biting back and linking to you, through to providing other bloggers or site owners with tools (with embedded links back to your own site) that they can put on their blogs (we’ll run through more linkbaiting techniques in one of my next posts in this series).

In reality the term ‘linkbaiting’ is a new term for something that webmasters have been doing for many years. From my earliest days of blogging four years ago I know I saw people doing lots of things to get links (even though the term was never used).

How Does Linkbait Work?

A successful linkbait operates in four basic stages:

Stage 1: Linkbait Launch

The content is released, shared with prominent bloggers, and submitted to portals like Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit and Netscape.

Stage 2: The Long Tail of Links

If the content gains traction and visibility at widely-read sites, medium and smaller outlets and personal blogs will likely point to it, and RSS feeds of the link and content will spread across the Web.

Stage 3: Residual Traffic and Attention

Even after the initial buzz from your successful linkbait campaign dies down, your site’s traffic may stay on a slight increase due to a “linkbait bump” that keeps users circling back to your site.

Stage 4: Search Engine Rankings

The massive influx of links will cause a direct boost of the link popularity of the content piece, as well as an overall boost in global site popularity—and search engines tend to reward links with rankings.

7 Tips for Linkbait Success

Find Appropriate Linkbait Portals

Identify those news outlets, blogs or social media sites that you’re seeking to get a link from. In the areas of technology, Digg, TechCrunch and Slashdot are great candidates. For humor or offbeat news, Fark and Reddit may make better choices. Depending on your content, sites like the popular blog Boing Boing, Yahoo!’s Site of the Day or Netscape may make good choices.

Understand Your Audience

Normally, you’re building content targeted to your site’s visitors—people who want your products, services or content. But for linkbait, you need to also appeal to an entirely different audience—one that can help your site achieve mass appeal in the niche that you select. I advise reviewing the coverage you see for other links in your area; using del.icio.us tags and blog archives can help with this process.

Brainstorm Effectively

You want to find ideas that are so compelling, they blow you away. Imagine pitching your idea to a writer at the New York Times; would he or she be likely to write about it? If so, you’ve got a gem.

Build Beautiful Bait

The user experience, graphic design and usability of the content you build need to have the look and feel of success. A professional layout and tasteful headlines, graphics and embedded content will go a long way toward selling your audience on your content’s worthiness.

Create a Reputation

Linkbait is difficult to launch the first few times if no one on the Web has heard of your brand. Once you’ve spent some time in the blogosphere and social media space, you may find that a lot of your content goes viral without any effort on your part. Thus, creating a reputation is an important part of making linkbait successful. If you need some help, try leveraging industry contacts that have pull with prominent bloggers and respected profiles at social sites.

Grab Their Attention

Writing the headlines and initial descriptions to submit to the social sites, emailing bloggers and appearing in search results is a critical part of linkbait. Many readers will see your headline, and in the early phase it’s critical that they follow your link and help to spread your message.

Don’t Be Manipulative—and DON’T SPAM

You might have to try linkbaiting several times before you get good at the process; in the meantime, make sure that you don’t burn bridges by spamming bloggers with email requests to cover your piece, or repeatedly tagging your own content at the social media sites from the same IP addresses.

Search Engine Marketing

Having top search engine listings is important for any company. A good search engine ranking results in many visitors and sales! SEM (search engine marketing) can provide an effective method of driving highly targeted visitors to your web site.

The following is a simple guide to search engine marketing. Although it is meant for beginners, it can also be very useful for more advanced search engine marketers as a reference source.

Keywords & Search Terms

The first step is to learn about the search terms that your target audience is using when using search engines. These search terms are the keywords and keyphrases that will be used to market your web site.

Keywords are the specific words that internet users type in the search engine fields to find the information they need. If your website contains these exact keywords, in their proper density level, you’d have a great chance of appearing in a good position on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Whether you’re selling your own products, or promoting your affiliate links, or inviting people to subscribe to a membership program you have developed, you would need a website to carry out your marketing approach, and you will need visitors to come to your website to experience the success that its potentials promise. And the key to generating a lot of visitors for your website lies in the selection of the correct keywords.

Keywords take on a more important role when it comes to online endeavors enrolled with Pay Per Click (PPC) programs. Keywords would attract the ads that the PPC programs can assign, and once your visitors would click on such ads, you will earn a specified amount. There are some ads that pay a measly $0.05 per click. But there are also some ads that pay as much as $50.00 per click. How can you secure for yourself the latter option? Well, you must be able to determine the most profitable keywords beforehand.

Finding profitable keywords isn’t really difficult, for as long as you know what you’re doing. There are three ways by which you could accomplish this.

1. Go to http://www.adsensearena.com . This is, by far, the easiest as well as the most cost-efficient approach. The said website has long been a secret of people in the know. No one knows how the website came about. No one even knows who maintains its pages. But everyone agree that the information it contains are pretty much accurate, save for some entries which are a little bit dated. The website http://www.adsensearena.com contains a comprehensive list of keywords together with their corresponding Cost Per Click (CPC). Simply do a manual search and look for the keywords that command a high CPC. Then build a content website based on what you will discover.

2. Create an AdWords account. AdWords is Google’s service for PPC advertisers. Creating an account won’t cost a single cent, but it would give you access to a control panel where you could view the bidding for certain keywords. All you have to do is to find keywords that command very high bids. This would give you an idea about how much the CPC of those keywords could be. Interested with this approach? Visit http://adwords.google.com today.

3.A number of online marketers offer keyword lists of the hottest topics today. These are subjects that have little competition, and which can be profitably exploited for your AdSense PPC campaigns. Often, these lists come with reports detailing the expected CPC of each of the keywords in the said lists. The online marketers who distribute the same would require a fee, of course, but if you have made content sites the engine of your online enterprise, these keyword lists could prove valuable for your endeavors.

There are three basic components to a successful PPC campaign. These are your website’s page impressions, or the number of unique visitors who get to load up your pages; your website’s Click Through Rate (CTR), or the number of visitors who get to click on the ads displayed on your website; and your ads’ CPC. The right keywords would attract ads with high CPC, and you’ll be able to solve 1/3 of the equation. The other 2/3? This is where marketing strategies would come in.