I often get asked about our white hat stance. We talk about why we take this stance a bit in our post about the White Hat Kool-Aid Test. People will still challenge the idea and tell us we don’t see the advantages of “the dark side.”
Truth be told, we did not start white. In our early days, we were just as anxious as the next person to build our search engine traffic any way we could. We had our own site that we had published, and we tried several different tricks. I personally did more than 1000 link swaps in one period of 2 months. We purchased links in volume.
It worked great. We were rocking and rolling and making tons of money. Life was good.
November 14, 2004. That was the day the lights went out. We went from a powerful position in our industry to gone in one night when I was sleeping.
Our Reinclusion requests were ignored. While I did not think we were “black”, they were not letting us back in, in spite of the fact that we fixed all the problems. It was an ugly situation.
So we started to play the game strictly by the book. We focused on producing high-quality sites which we could get authoritative sites, including .edu and .gov sites, to link to. We began to interact with these people because we had something to offer to them.
Almost two years later, and we are rocking and rolling again. Life is good again. And this time I don’t have to worry at night that my income will have been flushed down the toilet while I am sleeping. And that is a good feeling indeed.
del.icio.us tags: search engine optimization seo online marketing
