Why Black-Hat Link Building Is Training You to Fail

White-hat link building is our favorite way of doing link building. There are so many reasons why, I'll cover the best one in this LBL article.

I won't annoy you with the differences between black-hat and white-hat link building, everybody knows about them. At the end of the article I'll attach some useful resources though.

So first one is the mindset. Not to underestimate at all, it's super important.

If you have a mindset of finding "faster" ways to achieve rankings on search engines (more specifically Google), you're doing something wrong, probably.

Because you're forgetting that you're working for a BRAND, where your ethics should be at the top level possible. You should be so professional and qualitative in what you do that you'll attract so many people naturally.

Most types of black-hat techniques like PBNs, MIGHT help you in the short-term (even though in 2025, it's hard), but you're in the wrong mindset, it means you're not ethical with the brand you're building / you're not serious in growing it, you're skipping the creative side of your brain because you're lazy and want quicker results.

You're training your brain to avoid real problems.

When you choose shortcuts, you're actually rewiring yourself to run from hard challenges. Every time you pick the hack over the real solution, you get weaker at solving actual problems.

Success comes from facing what's difficult. But black-hat thinking makes you allergic to difficulty. So when real challenges hit (you find out you had no real plan, algorithm changes, competition, market shifts), you have zero muscles built up. You just look for the next hack.

It's like a drug. Each shortcut makes you need bigger shortcuts, until you can't build anything real anymore.

Black-hat isn't just cheating Google, it's cheating yourself out of becoming someone who can actually build things.

This mindset will inevitably make you fail in the long run.

If you understand the above, you probably figured out the deep psychological problem with that mindset.

When you're working on a brand that needs links, you need to be able to create a master plan for it. Be serious with it. Stop spamming trash online.

First of all, if the page you want to build links to isn't worth linking to / has no advantage or benefit compared to the competitors' pages, then you have to take a step back and figure out how to be better than the competition.

Once you have a page that truly deserves attention and is actually useful, whether it's a blog article or a service/product page, you can start building your white-hat link building plan.

It's simple. If you're better than all the competition out there, then it also means that you should be seen as an expert as well. SO, use that expertise to your advantage.

Literally create legit social media and forum accounts. Whether is X, Reddit or Discord, figure out where your audience typically hangs around and be truly helpful to them. REVEAL all your secrets, be super open. Once you do that, people will find you truly useful, and since you're showing them that you know what you're talking about, then they'll visit you, it's INEVITABLE.

This is how you slowly build a brand, this is how you'll make your brand important and this is how by making your brand important, you'll have people talking about and sharing it.

Just like we're doing with this article. So the science is just stop keeping all the secrets to yourself and demonstrate to everybody what you're capable of. Again, REVEAL ALL YOUR KNOWLEDGE KNOW FOR FREE.

Also make sure you're always adding something practical in your suggestions, be truly helpful to people.

THE END.

Useful resources:

• Quality links to your site
• Spam policies for Google web search
• PageRank

Side notes:

• Sometimes you can do guest posting and even build T2 links on them. But the guest post shouldn't be made to link your site, use it smart to get your brand cited by AIs.
• If you're not getting enough links ethically, then it means you're not being useful enough to the public.
• Come up with creative ways where paying for links makes sense and cannot hurt your brand.