Paid for Blackhat forums a waste of money?
Author: Tim NashYou visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?
Blackhat SEO: Simply means techniques that might get you penalised or banned from a major search engine. Blackhat is a very generic term and the Blackhat Forums do often include email marketing techniques that most would consider spam. This is not an endorsement of such techniques.
Quadzilla opened up his SEO Blackhat forums on Christmas day for a limited time as a Christmas present so I spent half an hour looking round, I was pretty disappointed and I left feeling sorry for those members who spent their hard earned cash on membership.
Let me put some background to this post, Quadzilla Blackhat forums cost $100 a month membership fee, not to steep but enough to make most people think twice. For the $100 you are promised a forum that has some top notch experts and to be fair there are some pretty impressive guys in there. The issue I have is they are not talking.
So what if you are a;
- Newbies ??? If you???re a newbie then you are after questions being answered, so it was disappointing to see lots of unanswered questions, sure most of them were very newbie???ish but still this is not the place to find answers.
- Intermediate ??? You probably will want to go straight to the parasite hosting and large database section and will be disappointed, Syndk8 and Wickedfire have discussions all at a similar level.
- Advanced ??? You will want to go to the labs, to see the sophisticated cutting edge stuff and yep you guessed it nothing sophisticated or cutting edge mostly old posts.
The overall feeling was one of depressing lingering and slow death, which is a shame because it could have been so much more. Of course with 30 minutes I did not read every post and I???m sure there are a few gems but if I???m going to spend $100 a month I expect a forum that is organised, is moderated, has question answered or at least be told my question wasn???t appropriate. I would want to see stickies with the cutting edge latest ideas. I would not want to shift through posts looking in vein for a thread which might answer my question though to be fair this would not take to longer, in that respect it does keep one of its promises, their are not 100s of threads to crawl through.
Quadzilla forums are not the only places to find Blackhat/Greyhat SEO information as already indicated Wickedfire and Syndk8 are both excellent places to find information on various techniques, Wickedfire also offers a paid for area, which is either invitation only or by paying $55 a month which is significantly less.
There is one good thing to come out of the Christmas day present, it reminded me to resubscribe to SEO Egghead a fantastic blog, so not all bad.
Earl Grey
from Earl Grey2007-12-26 19:37:56
Thankyou for your kind comments about syndk8.
Tim Nash
2007-12-27 00:07:17
Hi Earl, When looking at blackhat forums I always use Syndk8 as my bench mark even if I just lurk, I have found a few gems in other forums but so far in terms of sheer volume of sneakiness nothing has quite top yours
but don’t get to big a head as I will keep looking.
Rome
from Make Money Online With Get Paid to Click Sites2008-01-09 18:12:39
I stumbled on this blog on my entrecard dropping spree. +1 subscriber for this blog. Keep up the good contents.
I’m sorry for this off-topics post btw.
Rome
from Make Money Online With Get Paid to Click Sites2008-01-09 18:15:22
Oh, couldn’t find a subscribe to feed. Just bookmarked the blog.
Angelika
from Angelika2008-01-14 02:18:35
Entrecard is working well for me.
Of course, a lot of people are just stopping by to drop their cards, but I’ve also gotten a lot of clicks from my advertisements on other blogs.
Not to mention the new blogs I found by browsing.
I LOVE it!
SlightlyShadySEO
from Slightly Shady SEO2008-01-15 18:19:35
Some people swear by Quad’s forum, but I’ve heard it’s dying off.
I personally believe that BH forums should be free, but with private areas for trusted users.
Tim Nash
2008-01-17 16:16:46
I can’t imagine swearing by it maybe at it :)I think looking back on this post I was in fact to kind I haven’t called it a scam because their is some genuine content in it but save your money. Hire that programmer instead
Adam
from Adam Taylor - Conversion Matters2008-01-17 21:13:11
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the recent threads update which is not a good sign..
Michael
from TvRadioNet.com2008-05-03 11:59:54
Totally agree, the easy way is to just read and learn by yourself, i used to pay for this kind of stuff, just to find out that they don’t wanna share anything…what is the point then?!