Suppose you have a site and you want backlinks for it, so you start 10 blogs or so on different hosts and make posts in those blogs (on auto-pilot mostly) for the sole purpose of putting links back to your main site?
I’m not sure if this is considered blackhat or not. Afterall the blogs are useful and lead to good content. But,… it’s not natural linking, so i’m in the dark here.
Anyone has an idea how this could be categorized? Grey hat maybe?
Perhaps your right. It could be seen as grey. I’m sort of new to this but, am doing
some of the same myself. Cross linking blogs can give you more links. Your traffic
could pick up too. There are also free exposure sights you can join. Some are
exploding their memberships. Picking high page ranking sites can help. You can get links
from high ranking link directories. You can post comments on high ranking blogs and
leave a link to your site.
Well, I think it is natural for people who have multiple blogs to have lins to one another. As long as the content of your blogs are good, I don’t see any problems.
I don’t think that this is black hat. However I would question its effectiveness. I mean if all the sites are new sites they would all have low page rank and credibility in Google. So the link value would not be too great.
Basically blogs are for personal use not for website promotion but if anybody promote website through it then it need lots of fresh content and timely updates.
In my opinion this is not white hat, because chances are it’s not something that the average person would do on the internet.
Your “gaming” the system with the 10 blogs, so I cannot see any way it could possibly be white hat.
By the same token I doubt it could be classified black hat either, because it’s not hard core, you’re not showing some content for the search bots and another content for regular visitors for example.
My vote would be “Grey hat”.
Umm not true.
I’ve got blogs that really are just static websites because they haven’t been updated in months and even years in some cases, and still rank very well.
for webmaster, this trick considered as grey seo, because this is common trick to gain backlink, but for google actually they don’t like it… maybe they will consider this method as black hat seo
It’s not a black hat nor a grey hat also. It’s normal to have multiple blog just to promote the site and you’ve said that every blog have a good contents on it. I consider it as a clean seo technique.
White/black/grey hat it doesn’t matter. As benno23 said, those links will give little benefit. For those links to be worth anything, you would have to develop the content on those 10 blogs (to attract their own links).
So now you have 11 sites instead of 1 to maintain and promote 
I would just focus on the site you’re trying to promote.
for webmaster, this trick considered as grey seo, because this is common trick to gain backlink, but for google actually they don’t like it… maybe they will consider this method as black hat seo
Any thing which is used for sole purpose to influence the search listings (not natural links) is black hat link building.
Thank you
I think the test that should be applied is “can your tactics be justified on grounds other than solely to artificially manipulate your website’s rankings?”. It seems to me your blogs are justified on the one hand by your statement that they lead to good content but that is then contradicted by your statement that their sole purpose is the acquisition of backlinks. There is no reason why you should not have as many blogs as you like on as many different hosts as you like if they are there primarily to serve the internet community. If they don’t add any value then they’re spam and can’t be white hat.
Some companies create blogs that look innocuous on the surface but are meant for viral marketing. If these blogs are brand new, then yes, the provide poor PR links. The practice isn’t white hat but the consequences are mild (you just end up with low PR sites most search engines ignore)
Exceptions are when the company is already well-established with a high-PR website and use blogs to create brand awareness.
That is considered as black hat…because having a multiple blogs then link them to each other is not good for GOogle…it maybe penalized…that’s what I think…correct me if i’m wrong…(I’ll appreciate it if i’m corrected)…
White hat. I have 5 sites linking to each other and all have the same IP address. All backlinks appear in google search, so I’m not pennalized.
It takes a lot of time to get good rankings and update content for 10 blogs…lots of work. If you are looking in the long term to keep the blogs going and get them ranked in search engines it could be worth it. But just having a small useless blog linking to your website will not do anything for your SEO. Google and the others place importance on quality of links, not quantity… so 1 solid link from an authority site is probably worth more than 10 links from your 10 start up blogs.
Yeah this seems like a lotta work just for some backlinks. I’d call it black-hat, but who knows really, it’s kinda gray. I’d think time would be better spent trying to get back links from more established web sites.
If you don’t use the wordpress API and type every post 1 by 1 in that annoying small wordpress box, yeah then it’s alot of work 
The thing is, if google would penalize this because it adds no value, it should also penalize web directories. They are also just links pointing to good content.
What i’m talking about is a blog with posts the size of a typical post on digg. This means a title, a small summary and a link to the full content.
creating multiple blogs is a kind of spamming. but as long as you’re creating different contents on each blog, it appears that they are not related to each other. with that kind of method, i can say that that is a grey hat seo.