Feb
5
2013

Why Young Web Builders are grey hat legal!

An article by Stephen

We don’t ever do anything illegal here, that’s just a cowards way of making stuff happen.

Therein lies the distinction between white hat and black hat. Black hats push it too far, white hats don’t push it enough. Grey hats know everything that black hats do, but they take the daring strategies of the black hat and tone them down to the point they are legal/ethical.

People say that grey hat isn’t ethical, but again grey hat pushes the boundary of ethics whereas white hat is about being plain scared and passive to the point where there is hardly any innovation at all.

Its like everything in life, if you follow the middle way and lead your life with balance you are likely to be able to look back and see that you led a happy life.

That’s what grey hat is about.

If you live your life to one extreme or other, you are likely to fail. Too much or too little of anything is going to cause you problems, but live life in balance, don’t identify with any one thing too intensely and you will be much happier.

You see it with people who drink too much, gamble everything, over use drugs, work too hard and spend their live sexualising everything. Too much or too little of anything is bad for you.

Grey hat fits perfectly for youngwebbuilder.com, because Young Web Builders are mainly guys and girls who don’t have a silver spoon in their mouths. They are not those guys who some wealthy daddy has funded or influenced to get rich.

Maybe they didn’t get a great education, who knows?
Maybe they got into trouble with the law, who knows?
Maybe they got sick, who knows?

Young Web Builders are straight up people who want to create wealth knowing they can look back in the future and say:

“I did it all and I did it my way”

How many millionaires can honestly say that?

So be smart, learn how to innovate like the black hats, add in some white hat and join us in working towards a healthy, balanced way of life, here in the grey hat community at YoungWebBuilder.com.

Stephen

Tags: education, working, Young Web Builders, YoungWebBuilder

About the Author: Stephen Ryan

Stephen Ryan is a Grey Hat and a co-founder of YoungWebBuilder.com with Oliver Neely.

Jack R.

To destroy is quick and impractical especially as the unreasonable destroyer feels ‘put upon’ when their property is itself destroyed, like the thief in the Arab market having his hand chopped off because he could not return and compensate those he had aggrieved!
A developer of a great site has placed in front of us a thing of practical beauty comparable with a bridge or a useful machine.
It is not required for the site to be pushing the limits of the written laws, just that it benefits all who visit in the way it was intended enhancing the experience of the visitor and the owner of the site alike.
Has life to be lived pitching oneself against perceived adversaries when reality provides enough of them already!
Patrick

I was not aware that there was a greyhat SEO. I thought it was only blackhat and whitehat. That being said, I don’t know anything about SEO and have no idea why they call them hats. Do you care to share they “greyhat” techniques that you use here so that those of use who are not “SEOers” can learn and possibly improve our own sites with these techniques?
Stephen

Jack, Yes, I understand your point, but this post is really about the creative spirit that exists at YWB and the freedom to explore every side of the fence (both black and white), selecting and mixing aspects of both, to form grey hat solutions.
Many people are frightened to step beyond the conditioned mind, (that’s white hat).
Others overstep the mark, go too far and end up damaging and destroying, (that’s black hat).
Yet there is good and bad in all, which is why we remain open minded to look at all sides and choose solutions that are both exciting and daring, yet legal.
I hope that is a worthy response to your comment.

Patrick,
Our position on SEO techniques is as follows:

White Hat SEO :- Prepare your content as instructed by Google.
Black Hat SEO :- Prepare your content to exploit the Google algorithm, in any way you can.
Grey Hat SEO :- Prepare your content to exploit the Google algorithm without breaking Google’s terms of service.

Here we tread the middle way. We are ethical like white hat, but exploit Google using the innovative, creative psychology of a black hat, but we ensure we are never illegal.

What a lot of people must understand is that Google Inc has constructed an algorithm which by its very design and positioning, encourages merchants to want to compete to get the highest, most profitable rankings.
In that sense, they are encouraging competition.
If there were no competition for rankings, then the very large companies would end up owning the top rankings and Google would essentially become a kind of haven for monopolies, just another kind of combined Yellow Pages and Wiki, which would ultimately reduce its appeal to advertisers and to the millions of other people that use it and expect diverse content, rather than content from the same few sources over and over again.
That’s the position on SEO anyway.
Stephen

Patrick,
An example of a grey hat technique is what is called “news jacking”.
Here, we do not manipulate the site content in order to rank highly.
How this works is you watch for trends on a particular topic that is relevant to your own website content and when a huge story hits, you write a post on your site that uses the same keywords and develops a unique position on that story. You then blast your post out on every social media site you can find with a backlink to your post (this can be done manually).
So basically, you ride the story, get the message out to every site that will benefit from the story and build a huge number of links back your post on the story, in turn for this, Google will rank you higher for the story and you get more SEO traffic. The trick here is to add a second keyword in the title and post that you really want this post to rank for and that will get you a lot of traffic all the time, rather than just for the duration of the news buzz.
Keep an eye on Google Trends and Google Alerts for the latest news stories and then hijack the stories.

Another Grey hat tactic is to find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for, analyse their website to find flaws in their SEO and then build a site that has far better SEO quality and outrank them,

Another tactic is to purchase an Aged domain (say 3 years old) which already has a page rank of say 3 and then build a website on that. With a PR of 3 you are already in a good position to outrank websites that have been around a lot longer than yours.

just some of the middle ways of Grey hat SEO!
http://enigmaboard.com lucasbytegenius

“How many millionaires can honestly say that?”

I doubt there are any, to be honest. You don’t usually become a millionaire without some sort of unethical (or bordering on unethical) method.
Stephen

Hi lucas, Whether they be ethical or not the vast majority of them will have
“done it all and done it their way”

When i say “they did it all”, i do not mean this literally, because very few businesses can be that successful with one member of staff.

By my comment, I mean to say “they built the business in their image, to their vision.
Not to say, they did all the work.

Why Young Web Builders are grey hat legal!

“I did it all and I did it my way”

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