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! :)
Topics: Internet Marketing, SEO | Comments
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