Ask HN: Competitor is successful with black hat SEO
The niche that my startup operated in was eventually shut down, but we had a <i>very</i> similar situation. I emailed other sites and asked them to include a link (many replied back asking for compensation, which, according to Google policies, should&#x27;ve been nofollowed, i.e., made not to count for SEO), bought ads on private niche-specific sites&#x2F;podcasts, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. I also paid someone to write &quot;high-quality content&quot;, which Google claims is the #1 way to rank, for months.<p>In the big picture, these strategies are very expensive and not effective at all.<p>We had about a one year head start and were the only place that provided the service we offered. Eventually, a (bad) competitor showed up. They engaged heavily in spammy SEO tactics and social media astroturfing and surpassed us within a couple of months, even though their product worked only 10-15% of the time.<p>We refused to engage in those spammy tactics. Partially out of principle and partially out of just not having interest in that muck, as it&#x27;s not remotely attractive to people who are used to being honest and doing meaningful non-spam work. But that decision absolutely did cost us.<p>My advice is to think carefully about what may actually be over the line and what you&#x27;ve been socialized to believe is &quot;uncool&quot; or &quot;distasteful&quot;. Then do those &quot;uncool&quot; things without making much noise about it (potentially even making some noise <i>against</i> it). Like everything else, there is the written rulebook and then there is the way things are actually done.<p>Business is competitive and if you&#x27;re not taking every advantage you can, someone else is going to come in and eat your lunch. You have to be aggressive. That&#x27;s hard to internalize (for me, it&#x27;s taken multiple significant business failures), but it&#x27;s crucially important to be successful. It&#x27;s a dog-eat-dog world out there.<p>As for Google and SEO in general, every successful firm is at least &quot;grey hat&quot;; they&#x27;re absolutely leveraging their portfolio as a &quot;private blog network&quot; (that is, a large, high-quality link ring) and otherwise regularly doing things that are borderline or off-book. If you grill them long enough, you can get close to having them admit this.<p>Google has been totally and completely gamed <i>for years</i>. You have to know that going in. If you&#x27;re dependent on SEO, you&#x27;re going to have to play the SEO games with all of their uncomely accouterments, or your business will lose out to someone else.<p>It&#x27;s really that simple, and no one wants to admit it. All these people say these tactics only work for &quot;a little while&quot;, but they&#x27;re mostly wrong; unless you&#x27;re being blatant, it seems to be quite easy to hide from Google&#x27;s spam team.<p>The real thing here is that Google is ripe for disruption. Virtually every query you input is going to be based on someone&#x27;s application of SEO strategies meant to trick Google instead of based on the ultimate relevance&#x2F;quality of the content.