As long as there is money to be made from putting content on the Internet there will be blackhat spammers. Blackhat spammers of the past are the ones that tossed up that site of jibberish, full of ads. They're the scourge of Google, hated by
Matt and
Jeremy. Of course, I've never done this... haven't even tried... ok, there was that once, but
A couple of the more notorious black hats these days are
Dave Naylor (Dave N) and
SEO Blackhat. These guys make a living on understanding search engine algorithms and manipulating them to gain traffic across their sites. They do not value a domain, or web host as much as most webmasters because they're always trying new things, getting booted, and moving on to the next. When they hit - they hit big, make a few bucks for a few months, get banned, and move on.
Blackhat spammers are the reason that it takes most sites a long time to get decent rankings with their sites these days. Recent algorithm changes in Google, and to a lesser extent, Yahoo, have made the tenure of a site on the web an important factor. The longer that your site has been around, without being flagged as spam, the more likely that the new content you put up will rank well.
Because of this fact, a growing trend is to purchase existing sites, and
site valuation is becoming more of a science than the art that it was in the past. Black hats are the first to catch onto this trend, and snapping up old sites because they're at the forefront of the algorithms. SEO blackhat put up a very interesting post about his
current strategy of buying Google's trust.
If you could come up with hard and fast rules about how much to pay for a site based upon longevity, alexa rank, pr, and size, you could have a very nice little long term business. I firmly believe that
domains are the new real estate, and the internet is a solid investment vehicle that's currently under-valued. Like all good investment strategies this will only last as long as it's relatively under-the-radar. Once it gets on the average Joe webmaster's screen, the bubble inflates and pops. Or at least, evens out.
Watch the black hats - much like the porn industry, they're always at the edge. Bleeding first, so the rest of us can learn what works, and what doesn't.
TG
Labels: programming