Just as there are two sides to the Force, the light side and the dark, so there are two sides of SEO: white hat and black hat. Black hat tactics are the sorts of cheats and corruptions that weak SEO’s might be tempted to use, the way a struggling athlete may consider performance enhancing drugs. Don’t be that loser. But nevertheless, consider this: doctors take the Hippocratic oath, and nevertheless spend their careers poisoning their patients (with medications) and chopping them up (with scalpels), so even if you are dedicated to your white hat tactics, which well you should be, you could learn a few things from the nefarious scheming of black hatters, such as what to avoid, naturally enough, but also, what to use in a white hat way.

Here are some black hat tactics that can be adapted to some good ends.

Blog spam – Generate a Wordpress blog and let the spammers add your keyword to it, removing the outgoing links the bots usually add.

Duplicate Content on Multiple Domains – Put your content under a creative Commons License and include attribution.

Domain grabbing – Salvage authority domains and breathe new life into them.

Fake News—But instead create real news about real events. Sure to generate traffic.

Keyword stuffing – Let users tag your content (folksonomy) or ad several tags to a given object.

Misspellings – Rather than nabbing the attention of poor spellers (most of us from time to time), you can provide the correct spelling of a word and redirect to what the searcher actually was looking for.

IP delivery – Note the country associated with an IP address and offer them the choice of content appropriate for their context.

301 redirects – You can redirect searchers to up to date versions of your page, as when you gain a new domain or scrap something outmoded.

Hidden text – You can couch text in mouse over text to make your site more usable and yet get the keywords in there.

Automatically generate keyword pages – If you have a considerable amount of content, consider generating pages from each Google search query.

Scraping – Generate a mirror of a successful cite and offer them to their webmasters at a rebate.

Ad only pages – Let the ad only pages be a stop gap before you offer your content.

Link Farm – Create a set of many legitimate blogs and link them together.

New exploits – Report them as soon as they arise: rather than using them you warn others about them, and they come to listen

Brand Jacking – Blast a produce that disappointed you and let other consumers join in.

Rogue Bots – Find broken links on other sites and inform them about it: they may gratefully link you.

Doorway pages – Make your doorway page worthy enough to stand on its own, and you can still get high optimization as most junk doorway pages do.

Multiple subdomains – Offering your users their own subdomain will bolster your ranking.

Twitter Automation – This can be a way to cut back on human work, but be sure a human is involved and it’s not a lot of noise.

Throw Away Domains – Trendy search phrases can be made into an exact name for a domain name you subsequently drop when the trend ends.

Cloaking – Show Google only an optimized light version of your website, without Flash animations.

Paid Links – Make donations to charities or companies who offer applications on a donation basis: they may link you out of gratitude.

Most black hate abuses can be tweaked to serve good, the way a snakes’ venom can be made into an antidote for the venom. Get creative with it!