Always do what the number one ranked site does better.
Sometimes that means directly copying. Other times that might be taking a better approach. You need to be able to identify what is going to work for your market quickly.
You will struggle to run a successful white hat campaign on a “buy viagra” or “online casino” type of keyword phrase. It’s not impossible, especially with the RCS mindset and advanced prospecting strategies we have. You should run one campaign white hat, another grey, and another black if you’re in that space.
At the end of the day, whether it’s white hat, grey hat, or black hat you need to focus on getting contextual links from sites that actually rank. Read that again because that is golden information right there. That’s where you will get the greatest result for your efforts spent. It doesn’t matter the site’s PageRank, traffic, number of links, etc. What matters most is does the site rank well in Google, particularly, do they have close to a 1:1 ratio of number of pages indexed compared to keywords ranking in the Top 50 (according to SEMRush). Along with the ratio, they should have a solid presence in the Top Five for some solid keywords. If they do, that is a site you absolutely want to get links from because Google loves that site already.
Which Hat You Should Wear
You need at least one site white hat. That is your main money-making brand. Protect it, it can survive for many years to come. It will take the longest to build and rank, but it is worth the wait.
You should probably spend 80% of your time in the grey hat space. Build most of your money sites with grey hat strategies. It’s easy, and it works very quickly.
“But black hat is cool! I want to start with that!” – Too bad. Most members we have consulted simply don’t need black hat as part of their toolset. It takes too much time to learn and monitor. Plus the monthly cost for things like proxies, content generation software, etc. add up to more than it costs for an awesome grey hat campaign. Only add black hat once you are dominating with grey hat, or if you have very “nasty” keywords to rank for. That being said, black hat can be very profitable when applied correctly.