On Threadwatch today I saw that blackhat seo has announced on his blog that he is sarting a new exclusive forum for 100$ a month.
If been pinged by a few people about this. Here is my take on the deal:
(Lets take money out of the mix for a second).
I think its interesting someone is making a exclusive forum and charging a decent price for it. I mean for free you can see what forums there are there and most of them are not even black hat related but more webmaster related.
sidenote: BTW if altering your pages so search engines will rank them better is blackhat then isnt all seo blackhat seo ? Hrmm who knows.
I think I will sign up for a few months and see how it goes. I love to see what is and isnt working in the blackhat world.
1) If the 1 on 1 mentoring is half as good as its claimed on the sale page for security reasons alone I think its worth the price. Rsnake and the other admins can probably tell you in no time if your site is vulnerable to exploits.
2) Its nice to talk about the way things really work in a private forum and not have to coat everything with white hat sauce.
Anyway is it worth it for you ? If your askinging then its probably not.
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Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2415 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
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You just drove a ton of traffic to this guy’s new forum that I’ll bet he never thought he would have. I admit, I was intruiged, but I know that I’m much too much of a “n00b” to enjoy much of the conversation that will go on there.
On the other hand, $100 is really only one weekend night out on the town…many times not even that. I’m sure that that an adequate ROI can be achieved by almost anyone that joined.
Hm. Maybe I just talked myself into it! Haha. Thanks for the news, Shoe.
Although an interesting idea, it seems like a waste of money. What can prevent Matt Cutts from inventing a handle and signing up over there and taking notes of what BHs are doing?
I think it’s pretty scary when I thought of blackhat SEOs. This really make me wonder if whitehat really worths the time or not since you can always turn to the dark side! Lol.
Shoe, I would love to hear what your opinons are on the forum. I’ve signed up, just haven’t paid yet. I’ve been in SEO for years just never jumped into the dark side. I now hear it calling me and am interested in seeing the under carrage of it all.
Problem I see…
You join too early and you just spent $100 to watch all the new people who don’t know what they’re doing clutter the forum with stupid questions. You’ll probably not gain much since it’ll be just starting and all the really juicy stuff may not get added till later. -OR- You wait too long and he may actually stick to what he said and the price jumps to like $500/month or something.
Sucks…
One of my friends pointed that site out to me as well the other day. He wanted to release a few of our secrets to those guys in hopes that they’d let him be one of the free members.. I told him he was crazy.
Was this a plug?
Not to be a cynic…
So….. the forum has now launched and I know you are a member shoe. Can you tell if it was worth it yet? Please let me know.
I’m actually a member of that Blackhat forum and wanted to point out that it’s not exclusively about SEO… so it wouldn’t be catastrophic if Matt Cutts joined and started taking notes.
Some stuff – like offline promotion, SEM, link baiting, domain kiting etc etc doesn’t directly rely on SE rankings.
Plus a forum like that can be a VERY good spot to befriend up-and-coming as well as establish & successful Black, Grey and White Hats. Kinda like how attending conferences is often more useful for the contacts you make than the actual information being presented.
Just my 2 cents.
Alright Shoe, what’s your verdict???
Are there any reviews of the forum? If not, anyone want to write one?
I was thinking of the joining this forum…
I think I will check it out. Like the OP said, $100 to read through for a month, your probably going to make more then your $100 back so it would be a wise investment.
Hey Shoe…
How’d it go? Wanna spill the beans? What have you learned?!?!
- Alister
thank you for yur help
EDIT: Nice try on the smiley link
I have noticed more and more discussion on SEO Forums lately, many people are getting involved with sort of activity, will there ever be too many?
Thanks for your good tips!