That is a quote made by Darth Vader to Luke in one of the Star Wars films.  I feel it an appropriate title for my continuation of dispelling a lot of the SEO rumors that run around here.

I'm using the term darkside to refer to the world known as "Black Hat" SEO.

These are tactics and strategies that are considered a "no-no" by Search Engines. This is not a "how to" that condones the use of black hat methods, but rather a glimpse into their world to show you things aren't the way Google says they are.

A common theme I've seen discussed is how the best SEO method is to design for a user and not the search engine. That's actually the first sentence in Google's quality guidelines. 

I think that is very good advice in general, especially if you are just launching a new site.  But in respects to SEO, it's not the most truthful statement.

The fact is, search engines calculate your position in the SERP mainly based on offsite factors.  I don't know the exact ratio (no one does seeing as how it's proprietary information) but for our purposes today I think it would be safe to say it's 90% off-site.  If this really is the case, then how can "user friendly" content be "the best" strategy... the answer is it can't.

Proof of this can be seen by doing a Google search for the term miserable failure. The #1 result is the biography of George W Bush on the official whitehouse website, whitehouse.gov.  If you do a control F on the page, you will see that the term "miserable failure" is not contained anywhere in the content.  Well if it's not in the content, why does Google think it's the best website for that keyword.  Well I've already answered that quetion, and the answer is OFF-SITE STRATEGY!  That shows you how powerful a backlink from a few authority websites can be!

Now let us delve a little deeper into dark world of black hat, which is where we will find more proof.

 If you have the number 1 natural listing for the term "buy viagra" on Google, you can expect to make at least $10K A DAY!  That's why it is one of the most "vertical" search terms in Google. By vertical I mean it is constantly changing everyday with a new #1 every other day or so.  This is what all the web spammers are after.  So if you do a search on Google for buy viagra you may be surprised by the results.  The #1 spot is some college student's message board page with a simple one sentence message and a link.  How would Google consider that user friendly with good content?  Well if you are starting to understand things as they really are, you will know that the content had no part in this.  If you do a check of the banklinks going to this obscure message board page, you will see it has over 1000! 

If the user friendly content was the best strategy, why would things like this happen? Well they wouldn't which is how you now know that it's not true. 

BACKLINKS ARE KING - NO IFs, ANDs, or BUTs about it!

 I'm not going to describe what these spammers did to get all those links, but here is the important thing you need to pick up on.  It wasn't just the backlinks that got it the number one position.  I'm sure there is some site that has 40K backlinks for the same term, and it doesn't even fall into the top 100. The factors involved are the QUALITY of backlinks, i.e. most of them are from blogs, and the fact that the student message board is associated with the domain name Virginia.edu, which is a very old and established domain with a PR of 8!  Virginia.edu has been an existing domain since 1995 and was probably registered earlier than that! 

So now you know a few things that Google REALLY considers important.  Yes this is blackhat and yes the methods they used were despicable, but the point is.. it made the algorithim think it was the best site in the world for that term!

My reason for telling you this, is that one day you may find that you've just done the best job you can do with regards to ON-SITE strategy, and you still have no results.  This is when you may want to put on a "grey hat".  These are tactics which aren't quite "white hat", but at the same time it can't negatively affect your site.  It doesn't hurt to throw in a text link to your site on a forum, guestbook, or blog when the opportunity is appropriate.  If your blog is not going like you think it should, it doesn't hurt to "ghost" some comments to simulate activity.  Theres a lot of little things like that you should be able to figure out and identify when the opportunity presents itself.

But David! Are you sure I can't get banned for doing things like that?

Yes, I am absolutely sure.  If Google did have some way of figuring out that links posted in a blog were put there just for the purpose of SEO (which they don't) they still would not be able to penalize you for it. Otherwise your competition would just be able to set up all kinds of sites and put links all over the web for the purpose of getting YOU penalized out of the index.  This is why OFF-SITE can NEVER hurt you, only help you.

There is nothing wrong with this, and you almost have to start thinking this way if you want to stay competitive.  Lets say you did everything you were supposed to do according to Google's guidelines, and still didn't have results in a year for the keyword (your city here) real estate. Should you just say "well I guess Google doesn't think I'm relevant for (your city here) real estate, so I should find a new profession.  NO!  What does Google actually know about (your city here) real estate anyways?  Therefore you need to "convince" Google that your site is relevant. :)