Most average SEOs shudder at the mere mention of “Blackhat SEO”. The major concensus is that it will get your website banned by Google Almighty and company. But what if you have played all your whitehat cards and yet your rankings are “stucked” at a certain position? Or you happen to be in a popular niche like health and finance, where many Internet Marketers are also vying for the top spots to make a couple of bucks from Adsense?

Sure, things like cloaking, hiding text and using sneaky redirects put your website at risk, but there are other blackhat methods that are …errr… less harmful. I believe most of these SEOs have never personally experimented with blackhat or are even aware of the capabilities of the tools out there.

In this article, I’m going to share what the more savvy Internet Marketers are doing to build links quickly and cheaply. Although you may not have the same luxury as them, since they can simply create a new money website/blog if their existing ones get banned, there are methods to protect your business website, e.g. by using “buffer” sites.

Without further ado, here are the popular blackhat link-building methods:

1. Forum Profile Links
Known within the circle as “Paul & Angela’s links”, forum links are the most popular method because there are literally more than a hundred thousand forums on the Internet. Every week, Paul and Angela release “packets” of high PR forum URLs to the community, where they can register as forum members and add valuable textlinks in their profiles.

There are certain tools that can even automate the process of registration, account activation and profile setup, creating thousands of forum profiles at the click of a button - an impossible task for the whitehat SEO.

2. Blog Comments
Ever wonder why you receive lots of spam on your blog? Blackhatters can search for related blog posts, filter by blog type and spam your comment box till kingdom come, at the touch of a button. The worst part is that you won’t know who hit you because these tools use anonymous proxies - with the ability to even rotate among a whole list to avoid detection. So if your blog has a good PageRank, automatic comment approval and allows dofollow anchortext links, you’re screwed!

3. Articles & Press Releases
It’s common knowledge that most established article directories demand original content and that Google is less likely to index duplicate content that “do not add value” to the original. There are blackhat tools that are able to scrape for content based on keywords, mash up sentences to make the article look unique and even make use of Google’s translation tool as an extra step. I’ve also written before about the existence of article spinners that can randomly “spin” articles by replacing words in the article from a user-created database of synonyms. Some of these tools are so complex, they can spin entire sentences and paragraphs, and even do “nested spinning”. Here’s an example of how a spin syntax looks like…

{I am|Larry Lim is} the {best|leading|macho} {SEO|Search Engine Optimization|Online Marketing} consultant in Singapore.

4. Blogs
There exist Wordpress plugins that can scrape RSS feeds, fetch the full post, re-write the article, attach related media files and post to the Internet Marketer’s blog at scheduled intervals, automatically - a remarkably easy “set it and forget it” system to build a blog empire. For link-building, there are established blog farms running on unique C-Class IPs (some running into the thousands) that will allow you to submit your spinned articles with embedded textlinks, or better yet, write the articles for you for a truly hands-off experience. Such services cost anywhere from $57/month to $127/month.

5. Social Bookmarks & RSS Aggregators
Next, all your linkbuilding effort would be worthless if the backlinks are not recognized/indexed by Google (I don’t really support this opinion, but that’s for another blog post), and that’s where social bookmarks come into play. As for the thousands of forum profile spam, the usual practice is to convert the links to RSS feeds and then submit them to RSS aggregators. Naturally, all these can be inter-linked with Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and Hubpage, to make them look more “credible”.

Once again, all these steps can be automated or at least, semi-automated using blackhat tools. You can automate the account creation+activation process, use spin syntax and post randomly, so that it doesn’t look like it’s machine-submitted - some of the tools even integrate with 3rd party CAPTCHA services to save you the trouble of having to manually enter the security text.

6. Social Media
And to round it off, there are tools that can easily create videos out of documents, for submission to YouTube. They can generate comments and views to make the video popular. There are Facebook and Twitter apps that can drive lots of friends and followers to your account. There are even scripts that can extract conversations from Yahoo Answers and post them to blog comments, to make the blog look “alive”!

As mentioned earlier, you can build the links to ”buffer” sites, like a Wordpress blog or Ezine article, instead of directly to your business website if you’re afraid of the risks. Then simply put links from these “buffer” sites to your main website - don’t worry, the linkjuice from your linkbuilding effort will be passed on accordingly.

> Here’s a list of 30 blackhat SEO techniques (mostly on-page stuff) by SEOptimize