11 Ways to Camouflage Your SEO and Link Building Efforts

One of my favorite movies–and this is going to date me–is Running Scared, with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines. It’s a great flick if you haven’t seen it.

One of the more memorable moments in the movie is when Billy Crystal’s character asks an auto mechanic to make his squad car invisible, to camouflage it.

Now, I can remember thinking, “How do you camouflage a police car in the city? Grey, white and black jagged patters?” The idea really confused me. I was thinking to literally about camouflage and didn’t really even come close to the solution until the mechanic revealed the camouflaged car.

Any guesses?

Here’s a hint. He used yellow–about the brightest color you could use. Seems completely like the wrong way to go, doesn’t it.

Still stumped (or maybe you saw the movie).

The auto mechanic turned the squad car into a cab. Brilliant. It is probably one of the best ways to camouflage a car in the city.

Hiding your SEO and Link Building Efforts

Which brings me back to SEO, link building and camouflage. As search engines continue to mature, they will become better and better at identifying black-hat and grey-hat SEO tactics, preferring the pristine webscape of an all-white-hat experience for their users.

After all, a search engine’s entire business model is relevant and valuable search results–and gaming the system can only muddle those results. Poor results, in turn, alienate users who searched for “used cars” and received results for Viagra instead.

But the SEO community has always been about evolution and revolution. It is evolve or die (in the rankings). So how can marketers properly mask their SEO activities that might otherwise fall under a search engine’s knife? By using camouflage.

Perplexed?

Turning Invisible

How can an SEO tactic wear a camo jacket? Think Running Scared. SEO isn’t in the woods; it’s on the web. So what does a web-camouflaged SEO tactics look like?

It takes-on the appearance of what normal web-surfing activity looks like. Huh? What’s that? It’s simple; SEO camouflage is concerned with elements such as link velocity, anchor text, post & comment text, citations, neighborhoods, and above all, diversity.

If you have read every great SEO book and blog out there and follow the suggestions–just like thousands of other marketers–guess what your activities look like to the search engines? You might as well be wearing a hunter’s day-glow vest.

Your website’s link profile looks like the profile of a website that has hired an SEO dude to boost rankings, and not like a website that has garnered the respect and admiration of thousands or tens of thousands of surfers. Get it? If you act, walk and talk like an SEO that is what the search engines will see. But if you act, walk and talk like bunch of different people, then you don’t look like an SEO.

So how can you make your website’s profile seem more “natural”? Here’s a few tips:

1. Alter your anchor text. Don’t just use the same keywords/phrases. Changed it up.
2. Target different areas of your website. Don’t keep targeting the same page. Build links to pages throughout your site, as well as to the targeted pages.
3. Create non-linking citation as well as links. Non-linking citations or mentions are becoming increasingly important, because more people will talk about you than they will link to you. If you have a disproportionate number of links to mentions, guess what you look like.
4. Create NoFollow as do follow links. Don’t just build do follow links; build links wherever you can find relevant and/or high traffic opportunities.
5. Create links/citations on high, medium and low PR websites. Spread your links out.
6. Stagger your link velocity. A consistently hot link velocity sends up red flags. Unless of course your the one that breaks a great news story. But if you are doing the link building, watch your velocity.
7. Diversify your links and citations. Use different websites–don’t create 10,000 links on answers.yahoo.com, and 0 links anywhere else.
8. Diversify your tactics: articles, PR, book marking, comments, etc.
9. Make meaningful comments and posts. Don’t cut and paste the same lame “Great post. I will have to try that.” comment.
10. Alter your signature. Use different names, email addresses, etc.
11. Stay as far away from SEO spam-havens (FFA, crap directories, etc.) as possible.

I am sure there are many more ideas out there. I would love to hear about them (please, comment below).

Eventually We Become What We Aspire To Be

Ironically, the more we, as SEOs, emulate white-hat tactics through camouflage, the more we eventually become white-hat SEOs. Instead of trying to manipulate a social environment into buzzing about our product, we find that it is far more easy and cost-effective to simply create buzz-worthy content. And Rather than posting on dozens of different blogs and communities, we can create more of a viral effect by dedicating ourselves to just a few communities.

You get the idea.

I would love to hear your feedback. Let’s start the conversation.

Similar Posts:

• Natural vs. Unnatural Link Building Video
• Looking Natural: 9 Ways to Add Variety to Your Anchor Text
• What is Black Hat SEO?
• Be Careful Not To Sell Your Tomorrows For Today
• How to Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties While Link Building

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Link Building (General), SEO (General). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.