Over the last several years I’ve seen different types of websites come and go. You might recall the era when auto-generated indexes dominated Google’s search results for a short time until Google figured out a way to delist them. More recently I’ve noticed blog sites that have content that’s been obviously scraped from legitimate websites and the words modified to make somewhat awkward phrasing. These various websites are built with one purpose in mind–gain high rankings on key search terms, and then make the most pertinent content on those pages the advertisements that Google serves up. The idea is to make money on pay-per-click. I always knew how it worked in theory, but I decided that I’d like to better understand why these people work so hard at what they do.

I spent the better part of my day recently exploring black hat SEO tools and techniques. It’s not that I want to become one of them, I simply wanted to know what I could learn from their approach that might also work in legitimate SEO. Much of what I saw was clearly disreputable. People try selling all sorts of gimmicks from putting together bundles of free software and some documentation on how to use it, to selling electronic books on topics like dog training and “how to” guides. There is software for spamming blogs and forums, hundreds of thousands at a time, and software for stealing content from other sites and republishing it on your own. These are all unscrupulous pastimes.

On the brighter side of this underbelly I did see a verification of approaches I do recommend to clients. Article marketing, link building, videos and podcasts, social bookmarking, blog commenting, and participation in social media sites all came up as things anyone must do, black, white, or purple hat, in order to promote your web presence.

There are far fewer bad guys than good on the web, but since most of them are scavenging an income stream from a few dollars per site, it takes many websites to make it worth their while. And though Google’s programmers are smart, the accumulated intelligence among black hat marketers is a force to be reckoned with.   There is a huge and hungry market for products that help these people get around the normal defenses that us bloggers and forum creators have in place.

We’re always going to have black hat marketers mixing in with the good content on the web. The ones that provide quality original content will at least be the group who lead that crowd because in the end, it’s the content that wins, not the page rank tricks.

Any prominent news source’s big story is going to ripple throughout the blog community as the story is picked up, reflected, commented on, and discussed. Rather than worrying about how NYTimes.com didn’t mention your brand, it’s time to dig deep into the blogosphere. Search on the article title and you’ll start finding the places where the story is reflected, and where there are fruitful opportunities to comment on the article, giving your own brand a plug in the process.

This is a job that could be handled by your internet brand ambassadors, but anyone can legitimately participate in these conversations. Just follow the social media rules. Don’t hide behind an alias. Don’t be afraid to say who you are and that you have a vested interest. If anything, the community will appreciate that they’ve made a direct connection with your brand and might engage you in a conversation. Just be prepared to take up the discussion, should one ensue. Nobody likes it when somebody drops by, makes a proclamation and then splits before there is an opportunity to respond to questions.