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5 Grey Hat SEO Tactics That You Should Use at Your Own Risk

By Christopher Jan Benitez Published February 12, 2018 Updated March 17, 2023

The SEO world is highly competitive. People continuously seek various opportunities that will make them better than other businesses.

Ideally,

Want to get to know some of them? Let’s get started with these five tactics.

Small website updates

Having an updated site gets a little SEO boost because Google favors fresh content. James Sun of Netotraffic claimed that they see a surge of traffic after updating their site. That includes even slight changes like changing fonts and body texts. And the amount of change and location can influence the score as well.

If you do some little changes to your site, you are tricking Google that you have updated content. This leads to them re-crawling your site.

Not many people have documented its success so this tactic can be a hit or miss for you.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking is one way to save exciting topics on the web which indicates that it is good content. This also gives a website better chance of ranking higher for the keywords they use.

If you start and create an account, those blogs that you’ll bookmark are the ones that you recommend. It’s even better if you’ve already built your following. This way, you can also establish yourself as an influencer.

Social bookmarking is a bit similar to social media marketing. Meaning, you will need to stay active, join communities, and engage with people. This can lead to more people discovering your site.

Search Engine Journal found that social bookmarking can even become the most significant source of your site’s traffic.

Here’s a list of some of the popular bookmarking sites. If you do this regularly (but not too often), you can increase your domain authority as well. The more links to your site, the higher rankings search engines will give you.

However, it could also be risky because you may be penalized for spamming if you submit too much from your website.

Article spinning

Article spinning requires you to use software to rewrite an article using different words. An original article can produce multiple different ones, but the perspective is all the same.

If you’re a writer, doing so limits your creativity. Often, it’s called the ‘lazy way’ of getting your website to rank.

There are a bunch of article spinning tools you can quickly look up on Google. But Google has already targeted and penalized websites that uses spun articles or any machine-generated content after their Panda update.

This technique is sometimes deemed as a black hat SEO and can backfire leading to the loss of all your efforts once you get caught.

Private blog networks

Private blog networks (PBNs) is an SEO tactic where you will purchase expired domains that already have authority. Then, you will use them to link back to your money sites.

Using PBNs gives you the freedom to do what you want in your link building strategy, meaning, you get to control whatever anchor texts and links you will use. This would be extremely beneficial when you get a penalty from Google because removing these links are just a few clicks away.

Additionally, the authority that the expired domains have gives you an instant score boost.

The risk?

Time, money, and energy.

Purchasing various domains and setting them all up can be costly both in money and time. You also need to factor in hosting and security. Some even create social media accounts for them to look like a “normal” website. So for each domain you buy, you may have to do 2-3 hours of extensive work in the beginning.

Here’s an in-depth guide to know more info about PBNs.

Negative SEO

Lowering your competition’s ranking instead of trying to increase your own is called negative SEO.

Here’s an example: you can contact website owners and ask to remove the links to your rivals and set them to no-follow or link to just their domain instead. This will result in a decrease in their ranking, and you will have better chances of “owning” the keywords you’re competing for.

The scary thing about negative SEO is your competitor can do the same for you. You cannot stop this from happening, but you can lessen and fix the damage by detecting it in an early attempt. Using a tool like SEO SpyGlass can show you insights on any unusual spike of links you have on your site so if this happens to you, act immediately.

This is a great resource to have an actual look at past attacks the others have experienced.

It’s also known as “un-link-building” or robbing other brands’ off of the links they’ve earned.

You may have already established that this is an unethical practice so if you wish to do this, keep an eye out for yourself as well.

Conclusion

These tactics may or may not be as effective as you think. It would depend on how you execute it on your strategy.

Your website is a business, and it goes through a lot of risks. You’ll never know if any of these tactics will work and we urge you not to use every single one in here all at once.

Keep in mind that doing so can also be a massive blow to your online credibility and reputation. Again, use them at your own risk!

Posted in Marketing

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Christopher Jan Benitez

Content marketer during the day. Heavy sleeper at night. Dreams of non-existent brass rings. Writer by trade. Pro wrestling fan by choice (It's still real to me, damnit!). Family man all the time

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Contents
Small website updates
Social bookmarking
Article spinning
Private blog networks
Negative SEO
Conclusion

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