Black-hat SEO: Google's Insights for Search "very valuable"

The launch of Google Insights for Search has been promoted as a tool for advertisers and marketers to delve into Google's enormous set of search data, revealing trends, rising searches, and top keywords.

Of course, with any tool designed around search terms and advertising, there will always be two groups looking at how to use it to their advantage: Mainstream marketers and SEO practitioners, and spammers and black-hat SEOs.

After today's launch, I spoke with three men who focus on SEO techniques: One mainstream SEO, another mainstream SEO who monitors black-hat techniques, and the third self-described black-hat SEO practitioner.

The first, Charlie Anzman of SEO and Tech Daily, was succinct in his evaluation of Google Insights for search, seeing some potential for black hat SEO use, but more potential for mainstream SEO practitioners:

"Like any new keyword tool, the potential exists for SEO's and/or bloggers to specifically target a (very) popular search term causing a possible dilution of results for Google and other search engines. Conversely, the addition of geo-location is something I've been looking at for some time, and could help those that really belong in the 'top-10' get there on a localized basis."

Aaron Wall of Black Hat SEO was the second respondent. Wall writes about black-hat techniques and how to fight them. He didn't see Google Insights for Search as much of a draw for black-hat SEOs:

"High search volume keywords are already very competitive. The really black hat spammy stuff isn't usually about ranking on the most competitive terms, and Google Insights isn't a great tool for finding the terms that black hat does well with.

"The other part [of Insights] shows popular terms. Spam sites are designed to pick up longer-tail keywords. Drilling down may help with that, but the data isn't that concrete.

"Paid tools like Wordze are already popular in black hat SEO, although they can be used for legitimate purposes as well. Searching for keywords, you can pull a list of a couple thousand related keywords. Free tools only let you go about 10 keywords deep. When you can go thousands of keywords deep, that's obviously better for things like automizing content."

Earl Grey of Syndk8 felt differently about Google Insights for Search. He describes discovering the Internet "by accident" when trying to get more leads for his advertising business, and quickly found he could make more money online than offline. Like many black-hat SEOs, Grey determined that by "pushing the boundaries" he could make more money than following the guidelines set by search engines, and is excited by the possibilities Google Insights for Search has for black-hat SEO:

"I like Google Insights for Search as a tool and an indicator of the trends and patterns of searching because i get to see the start of the search rather than just the end when they hit one of my multitude of sites. So in a way, you could say that it fills in a gap for me.

"If someone has a large portfolio of domains, white hat sites or black hat sites they will have a lot of data and see search patterns from the traffic they receive. We will scrape (automatically pull the data) the site to build keyword lists and i have personally grabbed some of the data to put into my control panel.

"The location of the searcher and the search terms or patterns they have is what interests me personally because I was one of the first movers when Google moved more over to their geographic search results and i still pioneer white hat and black hat techniques to gain traffic from a specific country.

"This tool is a pretty powerful insight into the mind of a searcher and i am sure the corporate SEOs

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