We often talk about
essential SEO tips and techniques here at Bloggers Passion. Do you know why? We know SEO works. It works like a charm and gives fantastic results if done right.
If you’re someone who’s looking for various ways to increase your
search engine traffic, try the gray hat SEO techniques mentioned on this
post. So first let’s talk about what is gray hat SEO and what are the
best SEO practices that you can implement on your site to skyrocket your
search traffic.
What is Gray Hat SEO?
If you’re into SEO for awhile, you may already be well aware of different types of SEO which are mainly;
- White hat SEO (deals with good SEO practices that obey Google rules)
- Black hat SEO (deals with ugly SEO practices that might get your site penalized)
- Gray hat SEO (it’s a combination of the above two)
Once you’re start getting good results with white hat SEO, you might
want to try some edgeplay techniques to boost your SEO results really
quickly. Here’s where gray hat SEO comes into play.
Gray hat SEO mainly deals with dubious tactics that some of them one
day could become black hat. You can consider these gray hat SEO
techniques somewhat risky but they give you tremendous results if you
practice them right.
You can consider gray hat SEO techniques as “questionable techniques
that actually don’t offend your website visitors but work like a charm”.
So there’s nothing wrong in trying them out especially when you’re
looking for desperate ways to grow your search engine traffic.
So without any ado, let’s talk about top 10 gray hat SEO techniques that you can use on your site to grow search traffic.
Top 10 Gray Hat SEO Techniques You Can Try In 2018
#1. Domain grabbing
One of the widely used gray hat SEO techniques is buying expired
domains (also known as domain grabbing) which still works like a charm
if done carefully.
What is domain grabbing?
In simple terms, buying domains to increase your own website’s SEO is
known as domain grabbing. Domain grabbing is nothing new. Buying
expired domains in order to improve your website’s backlink profile is
one of the most used SEO tactics by a lot of people worldwide.
Domain grabbing can be of two types.
- Buying expired domains
- Buying new domains
The first one is widely popular because you can buy authority expired
domain names which already has a good backlink profile along with some
trustworthiness. When you buy those expired domain names to link back to
your blog posts or home page, you’ll definitely get a boost in your
search engine rankings.
Although it’s not recommended to buy a ton of expired domains just to
increase your website’s SEO. But by buying highly relevant and great
backlink profile expired domain names every now and then can definitely
help you increase your website’s rankings on search engines like Google.
Before buying expired domains to increase your website’s rankings, here are few vital things that you need to remember.
Find out the DA of domain: DA (Domain Authority) of a
domain is a good metric which was developed by Moz team. DA easily
helps you find out the popularity of a domain. If it is good (anything
above 30), you can consider the domain backlink profile is good and you
can think about buying that expired domain.
Check for any toxic links: You never know what kind
of backlinks that an expired domain has. If it is fully filled with
toxic links or broken links, there’s no use of buying it for the SEO
purposes. So make sure to use tools like
SEMrush, Ahrefs etc to find the domain backlink sources.
So how do you find and buy expired domains to boost your website’s SEO?
Here are some of the helpful tips for finding great expired domains to increase your website’s SEO.
Find domains that are at least of 3 years old: One
of the simplest ways to find valuable link worthy expired domains is to
find out their age. If they are registered for over 3 years, that’ll
definitely have positive impact on search engines when compared to
recently bought and expired domains. You can use
WhoIs Domain lookup for finding the domain age and other information of any expired domain.
Clean backlink profile: Always make sure to spend
time on finding the backlink profile of expired domains as most of them
have messy backlink profiles which are either spammy or completely
irrelevant to the context of the domain you’re looking for. There are so
many tools available out there to analyse the backlink profile of a
domain which include SEMrush, SERP stat, Ahrefs, Monitor Backlinks etc.
Avoid toxic links built domains: There are so many
expired domains which consist of toxic backlink anchor texts which
usually contain chinese, russian or other foreign language texts which
are useless for your website’s SEO. So avoid them if you’re looking to
buy good SEO value expired domains.
Use Internet Archive: Wayback Machine
which is also known as Internet Archive consists of over 300 billion
web pages history on the internet which is really helpful for you to
carefully analyse any domain that you want to buy.
Referring domains between 50 to 100: Make sure to
buy those expired domains which already have referring domains more than
50. That makes sure that you’re buying an expired domain which already
has links from over 50 different sites on the internet.
Quick tip: Here are few
top places to find expired domains where you will find a list of few of the best marketplaces to find and buy great expired domain names.
Make 301 redirect
Once you’re done with the research of finding great expired domains,
it’s time for you to redirect all the bought domains to your primary
website.
Here’s where you need to use 301 redirect. So what is it?
301 redirect is a redirection process where a page is permanently
moved to a new location such as web page or website. It guides the
search engines like Google to redirect users to a new page location.
Most importantly, it passes 90% of link juice to the redirected page
which makes it great for buying expired domains to increase your
website’s SEO.
Here’s a great illustration by
Moz team about 301 redirects.
The above illustration explains that serving a 301 redirect indicates
to search engine bots that the page has moved permanently. Search
engines interpret this to mean that not only has the page changed
location, but that the content can be found at the new URL.
You can simply use a
301 redirect plugin
(free WordPress plugin) to redirect all your purchased expired domains
to your primary website or web page where you want to increase your link
authority or backlink profile.
#2. Increase your average content length of old content
Have you ever written long form of articles with more than 3000
words? We do that a lot here at Bloggers Passion and one of the most
lengthiest articles on our blog consists of over 16,000 words which is
around
top affiliate programs for 2018.
Most people don’t know that lengthy content works best when it comes
about getting more traffic from search engines. If you’re in a
competitive industry and creating 1000 word blog posts, start creating
2000+ word blog posts for a month or two and you’ll know why long form
of content works great.
Yes, creating 2000 word articles seem to be a lot of work but they work like charm.
Updating your blog posts with more content is one of the best gray
hat SEO techniques that you can implement to grow your organic traffic.
Long form of content has the following benefits.
- You can reach out to other bloggers to promote your content (who doesn’t like to promote an in-depth article?)
- You can attract more backlinks
- You will get more social shares for longer articles
- You’ll definitely see a growth in your search engine traffic
So how can you increase your average content length of your posts? Here are few tips that work great.
Know your why
Before you start to think about expanding your existing blog posts to
increase your search traffic, make sure to know your goals. Why do you
want to make it detailed? Do you want more subscribers, leads, sales? Or
do you want to just get more visitors from search engines?
Knowing your goals is the first step to content marketing success.
Also figure out who the content is for and what goals you’re trying to
achieve once your content gets updated. That way you can easily track
your results.
Topic comes first before anything
Find out the topics that are suitable for your target audience. The
best way to get started is to start working on your top 10 posts that
are bringing you most traffic from search engines. Go to Google
analytics to find out your top posts and start working on them by
increasing their average content length.
Since the top posts are already bringing you traffic, updating them
with more information, keywords and images can attract even more search
traffic.
Recommend reading:
Research and outlining is everything
We have been writing long form of content on this blog for a long
long time now and we know one thing for sure for creating great long
form of content and that is research is everything. If you are spending
quality time in research you will definitely find out a lot of topics to
cover within your content along with the references you can use for
creating great content.
So make sure to spend a lot of time doing research for your posts
before you even start writing. While researching also make sure to
outline your blog posts. You can use Google Docs for outlining your
content, make sure to include a lot of sub headings using H2 and H3 tags
so you can easily expand your contact in such a way that you can easily
create 2000+ word articles.
#3. Web 2.0 for building links
Web 2.0 also comes under gray hat SEO techniques because users can
generate, tweak and edit the content using Web 2.0 directories,
submission sites, forums etc. So let’s now talk about what is it all
about and how you can use web 2.0 for SEO and building links.
What is web 2.0?
Web 1.0 (the first generation of online) used mainly static pages
where users have no control over the information online. Web 2.0 (the
2nd generation) is what mostly consists of dynamic information where
users can make changes to the content to make it even more better.
For example, you can edit Wikipedia pages if you find something
misleading on a page where you’ve better knowledge. That comes under web
2.0 because you’ve the ability to tweak the content.
Here’s a great illustration between web 1.0 vs web 2.0 so you can easily understand the difference between both of them.
What are the benefits of Web 2.0?
Since all of the web 2.0 allows user generated content, it has the following noticeable benefits.
- Link benefits: Obviously people use web 2.0 mainly
for building links. Although most of the links that you get from web 2.0
are nofollow but still they are valuable considering the fact that you
need diversified links while growing your backlink profile as you can’t
only build dofollow links. And there are few sites and blog directories
from web 2.0 that give you potential dofollow links as well which are
great for increasing your website’s SEO and rankings.
- Quality traffic: Most user generated platforms send
you qualified visitors to your website which is really great for
increasing your overall website conversion rates. So make sure to spend
time on the platforms where most users are active (for example,
platforms like Quora where you can also add links to your content).
Web 2.0 sites work better when you’re focusing on increasing your
user engagement instead of solely focusing on getting traffic. So try to
stay active in web 2.0 platforms such as Quora, Medium or other social
networking sites instead of just promoting your posts for more traffic
or SEO benefits.
#4. The usage of PBN
There’s a huge debate goes on whenever someone talks about PBN. So
let’s talk about the usage of PBN to see if you can use it for effective
link building and increasing your website’s SEO.
What is PBN?
PBN is the abbreviation for Private Blog Network which used to be one
of the popular link building strategies. With the introduction of
Google Penguin update, most of the people stopped using PBN.
Here’s a great podcast about PBN by SEO expert Neil Patel.
Is PBN a black hat SEO technique or gray hat SEO technique?
If you’re building a Private Blog Network (PBN) only using duplicate
content and irrelevant backlinks, then it is surely a black hat SEO
technique but if you’re creating good content which is relevant to the
topics you want to rank for, then you’re doing it right and it falls
under gray hat SEO technique.
So how to create and use PBN for effective SEO?
There are basically two ways of using PBN for backlinks and SEO.
- The first one is taking help from other Private Blogging Networks
where you need to pay money for the links to your website. Most of them
are bad and there are only very few PBN networks that offer highly
relevant and useful links which increase your SEO.
- The other way is to build your own public blog network. This is
really safe but it takes time and efforts from your end. If you’re after
building an authority website by having access to a quality PBN, then
do this method is for you.
Here are few tips if you want to build your own PBN.
- Find great expired domains with good DA and backlink profile so you
can start creating single page websites which are relevant to your
primary website’s content.
- Never automate your content creation process. Instead create a single page website with highly useful and relevant content.
- Make sure to use link building tactics such as broken linking method, guest posting, blogger outreach etc to start attracting more links to your PBN sites so that they will become valuable SEO assets for you in the long run.
#5. “Careful keyword stuffing”: Find the perfect keyword density
Everyone knows keyword stuffing is a BAD SEO practice. But what if we
say, careful keyword stuffing is good for increasing your organic
traffic and search engine rankings?
Yes, keyword stuffing is bad and you should absolutely avoid it all
costs but if you are maintaining the perfect keyword density, then you
can reap the best results from your keyword optimization.
For example, if you’re writing a 1000 word article, use your primary
keyword at least 3 to 4 times to increase its organic rankings. Make
sure to use your primary keyword in following places;
- Title tag
- Image alt tag
- H2 and h3 tags
- URL
- Beginning and ending of your content
We highly recommend you to start using a great optimization plugin like
Yoast SEO which offers excellent features to easily optimize your content for your desired keywords.
So what’s the perfect keyword density anyway?
Keyword density is simply the percentage of how many times a keyword
appear on a web page. A good keyword density is 1% which means the
keyword you are trying to rank for appears at least once in every 100
words you write.
That means, 1% keyword density contains 10 keywords for every 1000 word article.
But if you want to be on the safer side, make sure to keep your
keyword density around 0.5% which means it appears only 5 times in a
1000 word article. That way you can easily insert your primary keyword
without hurting your content quality or readership.
Also we highly recommend you to
find LSI keywords
that are highly relevant to the primary keyword that you want to rank
for. That way, without keyword stuffing, you can still get higher search
rankings on Google by using a variety of highly relevant keywords.
Here’s a great video by Matt Cutts on ideal keyword density.
Pro tip: Don’t use any tool or plugin to measure
your keyword density. Let your keywords naturally flow within your
content if you want better search rankings without affecting your
readership.
#6. Start using social bookmarking sites
Doing excessing submission of your website links (new posts, old
posts, other blog pages of your site) on social bookmarking sites falls
under gray hat SEO techniques but you can stay safe by limiting your
number of submissions to 1 or 2.
That means if you’re submitting your latest posts or any other posts
just once across all the social bookmarking sites, it will not harm or
hurt your search rankings. In fact, it gives some little boost in your
search rankings as you’ll be getting decent traffic if done right.
Here are few of the major social bookmarking sites where you can
safely submit your latest blog posts to get more links (although most of
them are of nofollow but they still add value to your website’s SEO).
- Stumbleupon
- Digg
- Folkd
- Inbound
- Scoop.it
- Slashdot
- Delicious
Here’s a great case study done by
Search Engine Journal about the top 3 social bookmarking sites.
From the above case study, you can conclude that StumbleUpon tops the
list of social bookmarking sites followed by Digg and Inbound. So make
sure to at least sign up for these 3 sites and they are completely free
to join.
Here are few things you need to remember while doing social bookmarking submission.
#1. Engagement matters
Social bookmarking works better when you focus on building engagement
with other bloggers in your industry. Unfortunately most bloggers use
social bookmarking sites only to promote their latest posts without
actually spending a minute on sharing or reading others content.
How can you expect better SEO results when you only using social
bookmarking sites for self-promotion? So make sure to go easy with
social bookmarking sites and start engaging with other bloggers through
them.
#2. Find and use highly relevant sites
There are few platforms that are used by thousands of bloggers on a
daily basis where they not only promote their content but also share and
promote each others content. That’s what you should look for while
joining a social bookmarking site to promote your site for better SEO,
traffic and exposure.
Here are few of such platforms where you can promote your site for maximum exposure.
- Inbound.org:
This is primarily for those people who talks about marketing, SEO,
blogging related topics. If you’re running a marketing related website,
this is just for you where you will find thousands of potential bloggers
to connect, engage and promote your site.
- Blog Engage:
This is what we something we use almost every day for promotion and to
engage with other bloggers. There are thousands of active bloggers
across all the industries use and promote their content using Blog
Engage.
- Biz Sugar:
Another top notch social bookmarking site you can use to promote your
blog for getting links, exposure and traffic to your sites. This is also
used by a ton of bloggers and marketers worldwide so you can connect
with them to build relationships.
#3. Use unique titles and description
One of the most common mistakes many people make while promoting
their content on social bookmarking sites is that they use the same
headings and meta description.
What’s the point of creating duplicate content with the same headings
and meta description when you are promoting across various social
bookmarking sites? It leads to duplicate content which might get your
site penalized by Google sooner or later.
So make sure to create unique headings and description while promoting your content on social bookmarking sites.
#7. Link exchange
Again, most people think that link exchange comes under black hat SEO
technique but it’s not. It falls under gray hat SEO technique and let
us explain you a bit about it.
- Automatic link exchanging falls under black hat SEO technique while
- Exchanging links manually belongs to gray hat SEO
So what is link exchange anyway?
Exchanging links with other websites or blog is known as link
exchange which is NOT a white hat SEO technique which mostly comes under
gray hat SEO technique. Many people avoid it for the sake of NOT
getting penalized by Google.
How to exchange links without getting penalized by Google?
If done right, you can use link exchanges to carefully build
backlinks from a variety of sources. Here are few tips that you can keep
in mind to safely perform link exchanges without getting penalized.
Build a small tribe
You can build a list of all the relevant blogs in your industry and
then start contacting each and every blogger to promote each others
content. You can also create a Facebook group where you can perform
mutual blog commenting, sharing links, and linking out to each other
whenever someone finds something interesting to their target audience.
You don’t need a big list of people to build a tribe as you can find
10 to 20 bloggers in your industry to form a group on Facebook then
start helping each other out by sharing, linking and commenting each
other’s stuff regularly.
Link out to other bloggers frequently
One of the best ways to attract links from other websites is to link
out to other websites frequently from your content. Whenever you link to
any other website, make sure to connect with them through social media
sites or email so that they will know that you are helping them by
Linking. If you are doing it frequently you can also sometimes ask them
for a retweet or a link back to your content.
Here’s a great example of how you can do blogger outreach (email sample).
If they really find your content interesting and valuable, they will
definitely reciprocate the same and link back to a content as well. You
can also read more about
how to do blogger outreach for getting links from other sites.
#8. Submit your site to web directories
There are a ton of web directories available on the internet that you
can use to get high quality and relevant backlinks to your website for
free.
So what is web directory submission?
Directory submission is the process of listing your website on
various directories under a specified category in order to build
backlinks to your site.
Although there are a ton of useless web directory submission sites
which you should avoid but if you do careful research, you will find a
plenty of useful web directories that you can use to increase your
website’s SEO.
Here is a
list of few of the best web directories where you can submit your website to attract more backlinks.
We have created a
list of blog submissions sites
as well which have a domain authority (DA) of over 40. So make sure to
use that list to sign up for free and start promoting your latest blog
posts for better SEO.
#9. Multiple social media accounts
Did you know that social signals affect your website’s SEO? Yes, it’s
true, just have a look at the following illustration by Search Metrics.
The above illustration shows us the importance of social signals from
Facebook and Twitter which correlate very strongly with good rankings
in Google’s index.
- The no of Facebook shares a page has received appears to have the strongest association (a correlation of 0.37).
- Twitter is far behind Facebook but is still the 6th strongest factor
on Searchmetrics list of Google ranking factors with a correlation of
0.25.
So how can you take advantage of social signals?
You can create multiple dummy social media accounts to increase your
Facebook shares, Twitter retweets, Pinterest pins etc. That’s why it
falls under gray hat SEO technique.
If your content is naturally getting retweets and more social shares,
it comes under white hat SEO but when you’re deliberately trying to
increase your followers and social shares either by creating multiple
social media accounts or buying Facebook likes, then it is a gray hat
SEO technique.
Here’s how it looks like:
Image Source: Netotraffic.com
So what do you need?
All you need is to create multiple dummy accounts across all major
social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc, add bio and a
picture to start promoting your own content.
That way you can instantly get more Facebook shares, Pinterest pins,
retweets etc whenever you publish a new article on your site (you can
use social media tools like Buffer, HootSuite etc to automate your
social media post scheduling).
This tactic is NOT recommended if you are looking to become an expert
in your industry as most people can sooner or later find out that
you’re faking your social media presence.
#10. Build microsites
There are a lot of SEO experts who create and build microsites to
generate backlinks to the primary websites in order to get higher
rankings and traffic from search engines like Google.
Building microsites in order to generate links for a primary website
comes under grey hat SEO technique and if done right it can give you a
lot of search engine visibility and also quality backlinks to your
primary site without cheating Google guidelines.
A microsite can be either an individual web page or a set of web
pages that acts as a separate entity for a website, brand or agency. A
microsite typically lives on its own domain, but some exist as a
subdomain which can work as an extension to a particular brand or
domain.
If you are wondering about how to build microsites too quickly boost
your website rankings on good Google here are few tips that most SEO
experts use.
- Before you start building microsites to get more links and traffic
to your primary sites, study the successful microsites to find out how
they operate and work well in search engines. Here’s a great list of microsites compiled by Hubspot.
- Don’t duplicate your content. One of the biggest mistakes most
people make while building microsites is that they automate their
content process either by using automated content generation plugins or
using duplicate content. Don’t do it. Instead, create unique content
which is relevant to your main topic of your website (so the links will
be highly relevant and helps you increase your website’s SEO).
- Use proper web hosting choice to run even your microsites. We highly recommend WPX hosting as it is one of the best hosting choices that offers speed, reliability and security.
- Start small when you’re just starting out. Don’t try to build too
many microsites at once. Start with 1 microsite, make the most out of it
and then focus on building more microsites to boost your primary
website’s SEO and traffic.
There’s another widely used gray hat SEO technique where you can get faster search rankings and let’s talk about it now.
Making small changes to your site
Making small changes to your site is what basically tricks Google
search crawlers that you’re updating your site with latest and fresh
information. This will definitely give your site an SEO boost because
Google loves fresh and frequently updated web pages.
But it’s bit risky gray hat SEO technique because making small
changes to your site too often can get your site penalized because
Google might see it as suspicious activity so make sure NOT to make any
frequent changes to your site.
Here are few changes you can make to get SEO boost to your website.
#1. Optimizing for click through rates
Without a doubt, click through rates play a vital role in getting
higher rankings for the keywords that you want to rank for. The more
people who click on your results on Google, the better you’ll rank. It’s
as simple as that, so make sure to improve your meta description and
title tags for top posts.
#2. Changing your footer, sidebar or navigation
Changing your website design frequently can only degrade your search
engine performance but you can get a quick SEO boost if you make small
and better tweaks to your navigation, menu (by adding a search bar,
improving loading times etc) can work like a charm.
#3. Formatting your content in a better way
If you’re using only h3 tags within your subheadings, you can change
them to h2 tags (as h2 tags weigh more in search engine results). These
kind of small tweaks can definitely increase your content’s search
engine visibility so you can improve your website’s SEO without adding
any new content.
Final thoughts about top gray hat SEO techniques you can use to boost your website SEO
There are no specific rules about how you can rank a website on
Google. Yes, there are black hat, white hat, gray hat SEO techniques
that you can use to get higher rankings on Google.
But it’s always better to focus on those tactics that don’t get you
penalized by Google algorithms. That’s the only way you get better
rankings in the long run.
So what do you think about the gray hat SEO techniques mentioned
here? Do you have any more SEO techniques, tips or tricks in mind? Share
your thoughts in the comments below. `
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