What is Whitehat Automation?

Written by: Rob Adler | November 17, 2009

Whitehat Automation is a term that, depending on who you’re talking to, shouldn’t exist. To some whitehat is doing everything manually. To others it is staying within the guidelines set forth by the almighty Google. The real question is: where is the line drawn and what can you do/not do? Everyone will have a different answer and view points regarding this question, and especially how it’s done. Before I go any further I’d like to say that by ‘automation’ I’m saying scripts and programs, not outsourcing to other individuals. So, with that in mind I give you … whitehat automation!

It's a Robot!

An Example

Basically the way that I define my whitehat automation is by enabling scripts and/or programs to emulate whitehat activity. Even if it’s just helping and not doing from start to finish, it eliminates the need for you to spend countless hours doing dumb stuff like looking for blogs to comment on. Even setting up a Google alert to notify you when blogs are discovered with a certain keyword makes all the difference in the world when it comes to link building.

That’s an easy way to get 20-50 links a day (depending on the niche) from multiple sources over the course of … as long as you want. This also applies with Google BlogSearch and forums. Here’s an example query for your RSS reader, assuming your niche was “social media consultant” – add this URL to your feed reader and just visit the new posts and see if you can comment on them: link. For the record I don’t do that, I have a script that index’s these results and crawls them to see if blog commenting is enabled and there’s a form field for a URL. This way I don’t waste unneeded time going to results that don’t have the ability to comment on them.

Is that blackhat? Not at all.

I’m still typing the comments manually and submitting good quality content to people’s sites – I’m just automating the discovery of said sites using the first half of a blackhat script. Kind of changes your perspective on it, eh?

Another Example

Another example of whitehat automation is writing articles for EzineArticles.com, GoArticles, etc. Who said that you have to submit these manually? As long as it’s hand written is there really a difference in a script or program submitting these to the sites for you in order to keep it whitehat? Will Google be able to tell a difference? Will your checkbook? Yeah.

If you’re outsourcing or hiring a Virtual Assistant/Physical Assistant to submit articles daily you could easily save a few hundred dollars a month if not more by using a technology such as this. Now what if you combined the two into a system that allows your content writers to put their content straight into a WYSIWYG editor on your backend, and it gets thrown into a queue to be randomly submitted to Ezine/GoArticles etc – 1 per site, per night? Just food for thought, by the way – the system does wonders on residual link building for authority. :)

So Anyway …

This is just an introduction to whitehat automation to show you all whats possible and possibly even what you haven’t thought of. A lot can be achieved by booking a decent programmer for 3-4 hours and it will save you a -lot- of money long-term this way. Google is based on decently-advanced technology, it’s time we throw some technology back at it. Viva la resistance! :)

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Topics: Internet Marketing, SEO | Comments

Posted on 17 November 2009 by Rob Adler

Robert Adler is the founder of Lost Dawg, where he is an online marketing consultant. Everything from Search Engine Marketing to Social Media can be achieved with the right guidance. He tweets on @Bofu2U and is also located on Facebook.

Rob Adler has written 1 articles for Cloud Mixer

Jack

Great article... I just finished my first scripts a couple of weeks ago and using them makes a lot of difference (time and effort wise). With a bit of php and mysql and a couple of hours coding you can save a lot of time and effort by letting your computer do most of the work.

Rob @ Lost Dawg

Indeed - php + mysql with the most basic of knowledge can make all of the difference in the world. :) If you need any help with your scrips feel free to drop me a line.

Kaila S

Some great info here! I love the article automation idea, definitely seems like it could save a lot of time and money. While I tend to agree it might flirt the line with whitehat, deeming it a bit greyhat, the comparison with Google alerts as a source of automation for commenting makes me change my tune a bit. Still a lil greyhat overall.

Rob @ Lost Dawg

Thanks for the comment Kaila! The question is, why do you deem it greyhat? If google can't see the difference, is there even a comparison between the hats at all? :) They can't tell if it was a script or a person that submitted your article to a 3rd party. What if a script was made to generate your resource boxes so that it was dropping random deeplinks per article as well? Would that make it greyhat as well? Just playing devils advocate. :)

Terry Van Horne

Yeup, totally agree Rob! I use similar programs to build static looking ecommerce sites. Build templates then write a program to embed the SQL statement and write the "product item" pages which means the page is always up to date and looks static, other than the .asp extension... but even that can be changed to .htm with a little server config!

Anyhow congrats on the first post!

Rob @ Lost Dawg

Thanks on the congrats, and yeah you do make a lot of good points with eCom sites. A lot of people still make the same mistakes and do the exact same routines daily over and over, when it could be automated - then all you have to do is read a report!