I want to write a post about picking the most effective search strategies to achieve desired results. Further, I want to talk about whether one should go about acheiving those result by employing whitehat practices, or blackhat practices.

The problem is, I refuse to enter into the blackhat vs. whitehat debate and sound off as an advocate for either side. The two terms have become so clouded in ethical debate that its impossible to convey the concepts that they actually represent. So, it's therefore impossible for me to write the post that I want to write.

Unless you agree to a proposition......

I propose we approach a specific SEO problem, and that for the sake of this post, we consider whitehat seo as “organic search manipulation”, and blackhat seo as “artifical search manipulation”. I propose, for the sake of this post, we approach the problem while forgetting the word “spam”; we forget all moral, ethical and professional objections we might have to artifical/organic search manipulation.

Instead, we'll simply think of the following: Goal, Result, Consequence.

Let's say we have a Real Estate lead-generating site which has a variety of high converting landing pages that target particular communities and geographic areas. These leads are later sold on, for a premium, to realtors/developers in those areas.

Our problem is this: The landing pages on the site don't rank well for their respective targets because there isn't much content and the entire site lacks authority. Let's also assume that we want to be certain that the moneymaking site itself doesn't appear questionable and therefore doesn't have a lot of keyword stuffed content.

So our Goal is: Deliver quality traffic to each lead generating landing page without relying on direct search engine traffic.

For this example, we need to funnel both link juice and quality traffic to those pages through intermediary sites. These networks of sites are the middle-man between the search engine and the money making site. Their job is to rank in the search engine and pass traffic onto their respective landing page targets.

So, there are two ways to approach this, organically or artificially.

The organic approach is to create many legitimate sites with content written by content writers; each sites content to be targeted to its respective landing page. These sites have quality design, nice imagery and generally look entirely innocuous. There should be many links on the site that point to the target landing page (save for a few barely noticeable outbound links to related quality sites), also including onsite advertising (banners etc). This way it becomes pretty hard for the visitor to NOT end up at your lead generating page.

Normally the artificial approach would differ from the organic approach in that we wouldn't be hiring content writers, but rather, we'd be mass generating content that would target our keywords broadly. For the sake of generating Real Estate leads, we know that won't cut it, because we want to deliver high quality leads that convert into sales. Besides, since we know how well these leads can pay, we can still afford to hire content writers. So, in that sense, the artifcial approach to this situation is much the same as the organic one in that we create sites with targeted human written content. But that's where the similarities end. Instead of creating sites that please the human eye, we employ IP delivery. We show bots a bare bones site with our targeted content. This site also has some respectable outgoing links and some images and a basic layout, so as to appear legitimate to the algorithm. When the site receives hits from IPs not identified as being bots, they are immediately transferred over to the lead generating landing page.

So, those are our two approaches. Now, how about the results?

The results for the organic search manipulation might play out something like this:

For every 1000 uniques to the organic intermediary site, we might achieve 500-600 visits to our landing page. At that point, how well they convert into leads depends on the performance of our landing page. These people who convert will be people who A) resonated with the search result displaying our intermediary site, B) resonated with the content of our intermediary site enough to click on something instead of bouncing and C) resonated with the landing page enough to fill out the lead form. That all adds up to very targeted leads. They've passed a three filter process and we've successfully funneled them into our database.

For the results of the artificial search manipulation we can expect that for every 1000 non-bot visitors to our intermediary site, we will achieve 1000 visits to our landing page. Once again, how well those 1000 convert into leads depends largely on the landing page. Whereas above, the people passed a three filter funnel, the artificial approach passes visitors through a two filter funnel: they resonate with the search listing and click, and then they submit the lead form. These leads will be less targeted than the leads generated organically. That said, there are many more leads generated through this approach.

The consequences of the artificial method, in this case, are poor leads (if we care about our business reputation, we must deliver quality leads), and potential penalization for violating ToS. The costs and time required are relatively low compared to organically building site networks, but don't fool yourself: the degree of effort required is about the same.

The consequences of the organic method, in this case, is that we spend way more time playing grounds keeper to our farm of blogs (which definitely require upkeep!) but we at least deliver higher quality leads. We pay more out of pocket for the upkeep of our farm, and we have a much much reduced, but still present, potential of being penalized by Google. (face it, they're out to get'cha)

At the end of the day, the choice is yours. Perhaps you can cheaply pre-qualify your leads before reselling them and so the artificial approach makes financial sense. Perhaps you deem the risk of penalization to be too big of a threat to your business, so you decide that the organic approach is for you.

What's important is that we place all our options on a level playing field, and choose the one best suited to our goal, with the most desirous results, and least negative consequences.