World Wide is not really reflected by a horizon that covers only the English-speaking world.

And in case you hadn’t noticed already a long time ago, this English-speaking world contains only a fraction of traffic and turnover in the www cosmos.

Which is to say: stick to English if you are content with just a piece of the cake.

If you want to have the whole cake and really eat it, do what the big players do: embrace the globe.

We call it globalization and it’s all around you – but likely just missing where it would really count: in your wallet.

Why would it count, I hear you asking.

Ok, let’s look at the details.

The massive emphasis put on English sites by the IM crowd brings along some severe drawbacks for English sites. Get yourself some awareness here:

• On non-English sites you can almost certainly expect less competition for whatever market it is – you’d like to avoid that competition, right?

• Non-English sites generally receive more genuine comments. The newer and more exclusive the www appears in a native language, the likelier and the livelier users will respond to whatever you feed them.

• Filters and penalties have to be developed separately for every single language, and you will most likely get away with stuff in Mongolian for which Google would immediately kick you if it was in English. Expect Google to put out the sharpest algorithms in English.

Foreign language sites and content at the same time do also provide you some serious advantages. Let’s look at these now:

• If you want to place yourself as an authority or expert, you should acknowledge that there is little authority and expertise monopolized in a single specific language. Actually it’s quite the opposite. More languages imply more authority. Think Wikipedia…

• If you are looking for unique content, there is little that makes for more “uniqueness” than a different language

• The IM crowd loves the “r” word. “R” for relevance. Google wants to return the most “relevant” results, and you should try to get “relevant” back links wherever they are.
  If your back links come from sites in six different languages, for Google you are clearly more “relevant”, not less.

• Having sites in various languages truly makes you appear as a genuine global player – as which being an Internet Marketer you certainly want to appear and be perceived.

• A multi-lingo site empire would certainly appear “white hat” and “whiter” even if it actually was not.

• A smart white hat would have his quality content translated into various languages. Having this done for free by a software makes it already a bit “grey” but still a fully valid alternative to spending time and energy in ever more rewritten, spun and rehashed content.

• A multi lingo network is much better for testing all kinds of stuff. It might after all even help you to discover better products and methods for various cultures. We are based in Indonesia and find how campaigns that would fail in English gain top rankings if written in Indonesian. Indonesia is a market with more than 200 million people. And if you think Non English speakers lack spending power, it indicates only one thing: you’re racist and out of date.

• Link building is easier in foreign languages as the spam flood is much lower. Not many guys out there to spam in Korean, right?  And when was the last time you got a DMOZ.org link in English?

To conclude that, we frequently hear two arguments against foreign language sites, both of which are completely without merits. Here they are:

• You can’t monetize a site you can’t understand.

Wrong. A cool site will call in the advertisers in any language. Coke also sells in Colombia, right? And if the site turns out to be not so cool, there’s always adsense…

• You get a bad image from funny languages linking to your site.

Wrong. What happens indeed is quite the opposite. Do Adobe, CNN or the BBC only allow back links in English?

If you feel that you could follow us so far on the basics here, we have another article ready for you that covers some details of Multilanguage asset building.

But that is not where you want to go. You want to be all white hat. And here we are showing you two ways how you conveniently do that within the spacious framework of a large blog net.

The first way is keyword based. Set up a network with EMD’s (Exact match domain). If your domain name matches exactly the keywords you target,
you invariably get good rankings for these domains without any further effort once you registered and put minor bits of content on them.

Edit: Recent Google Penguin Updates
Google recently started to penalize what they call “over-optimization.” Google now finds “over-optimization” wherever there is an “unnatural” back linking profile, meaning a high percentage of back links with a low number of anchors. To avoid such Google penalties, you now have to establish a degree of diversification in your link building. Not more than 20% of your back links should contain an exact match to your domain name or the key phrase it’s optimized for.  

This is one of the nicest opportunities the search engines have put on a white hat’s table.

While it’s commonly known it’s still there because the average person is not prepared to invest 10 bucks into a new domain. Why’s that?

Cause people think “if maintaining my single all purpose domain at a decent ranking is labor intensive, why would I want to increase my workload by now doing the same tedious job for several domains?”

And herein lies a logic flaw. Because EMD’s will provide you with better rankings while not requiring notable efforts. You just need to have enough of them to make a good profit.

So choose: spent a lot of time on SEO for a given domain, or spend some money for a multitude of EMD sites, each of which gives you a small slice of the traffic cake.

Given that a domain just sets you back under 10 bucks per year, you would most likely prefer to spend more time on the beach and just pay your hosts – while remaining a 100% white hat without besmirching yourself with a single self indulgent link.

Simple enough, right?

The only challenge here is to pick domains for the keywords, which really count.

The second way plays the locality card. Set up domains based not only keywords, but on towns, cities, counties and comparable geographic entities that might apply in your case. If you are a mobile dog groomer in LA county, you should grab yourself domains like:

SantaMonicaDogGroomer.com
EncinoDogGroomer.com
VanNuysDogGroomer.com
VeniceDogGroomer.com
HollywoodDogGroomer.com
BeverlyHillsDogGroomer.com
InglewoodDogGroomer.com

Back in the day people spent a fortune to have their business listed in as many sections of the yellow pages as they could afford. These days a domain puts you back less than the cost of a pizza and gets yourself listed at the top of localized search results.

But nothing lasts forever: you don’t get your stuff listed now, somebody else will rather sooner than later.

Which means: have a network of localized sites soon and again stay 100% white hat and without the stigma of self indulgent inter linking.

Following either of these two ways goes without manipulating anybody or anything, not even the search engines. So no risk of any penalties involved. Being smarter than your competitors does not offend anyone, even Matt Cutts agrees for once…

Both ways require you to manage a large number of sites with as little effort possible.

Mothership was built to facilitate such enterprises.

Nobody can fly whiter than Mothership.

Does it feel good to stay on the white site of the power?

There was even talk about a “massacre” and a sensitized blogger community went into full doomsday mode.

A fact that actually says more about the sadly uninformed state of this community than about the actual event to which was referred.

Because that event was pretty much just fuzz about nothing, as a closer looks reveals.

So let’s for the first time have a look at the naked facts.
Completely no-nonsense and without any massacres.

Build my Rank (BMR) and some others offered the service of building your links through their “own private” network. Technically that worked well and indeed improved rankings for their customers.

The underlying business model of all these service providers made them a lot of money as they were even paid by their own customers to maintain a growing network through which they reaped the real rewards in the form of monetizing the traffic you yourself actually donated to their party.

This business model however made their networks as public and vulnerable as they could possibly get.

An absolutely unchallenging target for Google as soon as traffic and revenue reached a state that Google considered detrimental for it’s own benefit.

All that Google had (and still has) to do is buying links or posts from every entity that sells such services – and see where these posts and links finally pop up and discredit/deindex them accordingly.

Like it or not: it’s just that simple.

Believe it or not: Google can indeed afford to spend a hundred bucks on such services with the sole intention to shoot them down.

So basically deindexing proved only two things and nothing else:
•    These commercial link slingers were indeed effective enough to manipulate search results. Hats off to them! Google itself proved how well they worked.
•    Google however also proved that a sustainable network really must be completely private and not just claim to be so

So how could these services actually have maintained this required privacy and still have made a shit load of money?

Again the answer is simple enough:
Had they actually created a number of networks and each restricted to the promotion of their own stuff instead of selling services publicly, they would not have been caught with an open fly.

Just think about this for a moment and you will realize how easily you could do for yourself exactly the same stuff which you originally hired these services for and even much more.

With your own network you could build links and posts, manipulate your rankings, cash in on ads, milk all that traffic, build brand awareness, tickle social networks.

Playing social networks in your favor via strictly private blog networks will clearly be the money printing license of the near future. All experts agree at least on that if nothing else. You should listen to them.

(We might feel inclined to even elaborate on this a bit later on. Subscribe if you want to hear about stuff like this.)

But if you wanted with your own private network you could even sell links to other people as in friends and close contacts as long as you don’t do in public. Discretion is key.

So instead of getting the creeps over Google deindexing your favorite service, why not rather setting up your favorite service including all the cash flow?

Now do you want to whine or do you want to dine?

You want to dine, step up to the challenge. Be master of your own network. Just realize that none of these services ever sold you ANYTHING AT ALL you could not actually have had exclusively all for yourself.

It comes even better: get rid of the notion that blog networks are there strictly for link building. They indeed are good for link building, but they are also good for so much more and most people possibly never think about it.

Imagine you were a horse whisperer in Montana. You want to let people know you are there, you want to build brand awareness.

Now you could pay for ads and see your money gone for good OR use that very money to build assets. Assets, which grow over time without loosing a dime. Assets, which on top provide continuous advertising for your service of horse whispering.

Of course you will have sites about horse whispering, horse diets, hand made saddles and what not.

But why on earth would that hold you off from also having sites on the Montana Rotary club, Montana salon reviews, Montana radio stations, Montana pest control, Montana ceramic workshops and whatever pops up in your local economy.

Make money from them while of course prominently displaying your services and building your brand from every possible angle.

That’s how pros make money: from both sides at the same time.

What prevents most people actually from doing this is the time investment involved. Managing a large number of sites is tedious and takes of lot of time – or a really smart software.

Until now such software was custom developed and held under lock and seal by the big players like BMR.

But the times have changed. Now such stuff is available for you as well. Tried and true, set up in a way that even laymen and horse whisperers can apply on the fly.

Summon the power of your own network.

Build your own assets instead of paying others to build theirs.

Others are doing it now.

Follow the sign of the times.

Don’t be late to your own party.

Don’t know how to do it?

Follow Mothership

Soft Warp thinks that there cannot possibly be any ultimate “right” or “wrong” decisions here and will stay strictly impartial on this issue: you alone have to decide what is best for you. We can however try to shed light on our position:

The ancient Greek philosophers already established the necessity of coexistence between black and white. Since then this approach has been accepted and integrated in every major religious and philosophic system.

Except for the web community it seems, where black vs. white is still discussed with an impetus and zest as if Adam had bitten into the apple of temptation just moments ago and was now choking to death from its vile content.

Adam in this case may stand for any advanced web marketer – the typical customer of Soft Warp. But we don’t want our customers to choke from poisoned apples. We just want them to grow in creative and dynamic paradises, even though we are not half as religious as we possibly should be and not half as philosophic as we would actually want to be. Does that compute?

Paint it grey…

If you like it. But you don’t have to. You could instead opt for decent cherry picking among all the pros and cons from white over grey to black to achieve highly customized solutions. Solutions that perfectly meet your requirements both tactically and strategically – or short term and long term, if that fits you better. Soft Warp is here to help you achieve, not just simply believe.

Take the facts, not the stereotypes

No matter how much love, effort, creativity, time and money you poor into the golden chalice of flawless site development, a single change of algorithms, completed with a single keystroke by an overworked search engine developer, could ruin your dream product.

Like a burnt out star into a black hole, it could helplessly fall into complete oblivion, finally hitting timeless singularity way down on the bottom. White Knight’s glorious search for the Holy Grail would be rewarded by untimely and cruel death. So know this: the web is not Star Wars, and the White Knights get no guarantee for winning in the end.

Whoever thinks any different usually claims infallible insights into the future development of unbeatable SE algorithms, but Soft Warps stance cannot be based on the interpretations of fog wavering through the proverbial crystal ball.

“I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that” said Hal to the doomed astronaut in Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001. The viewers kept their breath then, when for the first time in movie history a simple decision by a stubborn comp humiliated mankind. But remember? The story did not end this way. As Hal 2000 was finally tricked by man in the movie, any Google God would probably suffer the same fate: slain by some audacious Dark Knight. Created by man, deleted by man, neither reason nor logic would indicate any other outcome.

Learn from nature

Mother Nature herself has taught us just how fine black tactics can work. Soft Warps in house pet, Araminta the tarantula, can produce about 2000 spiderlings in a single clutch. Black and hairy, swiftly and hungry they will wiggle into a universe that knows neither plan nor justice, just chance and coincidence. In nature most of Araminta’s offspring would die, but some would survive and thrive almost effortless. Not from love, but just by sheer luck. Many black hat sites are like Araminta’s children.

Purpose as solid as gravity

Search engine rankings surely are not perfectly predictable until the end of time, but there is no doubt that professional and consequential building of high quality sites with steadily growing and meaningful content will bring long term rewards. The frustrating part for the creators and optimizers of quality sites is that their growth and reward rate are very much based on the viability of the original idea for the site – and not all these ideas finally stand the test of time. This is what makes spamming so tempting: the spammer does not require much of an original idea nor a substantiated concept, but only the spontaneous location of a suitable market niche into which he can jump with the least possible effort.

From that point of view it appears quite evident to Soft Warp that white and black hats do not represent two colliding business principles, and certainly not two irreconcilable philosophies. Instead we are looking at the manifestations of two types of personalities. Both of them mostly just twist and turn facts until they have created “realities” that actually reflect and justify nothing but personal preferences. They might as well lead a heated debate if apples taste better than pears, and in which taste had become an objectifiable measure.

Apples or pears?

If your fingers get itchy as soon as there is no keyboard to hammer on, if you mistrust anything that is not here and now, and if you insist to see a short time relation between work and cash flow, you mostly likely qualify for a natural born spammer.

If you however tend to assume that the best is always yet to come, if you prefer to put concept before action, value art more than practicality and rest better on the pillow of long term achievements, you may consider yourself a typical white hat.

But in Soft Warps view all of you could happily exist in both worlds at the same time, if personal attitudes, ambitions and preferences would not obstruct the straight look at the facts. All you had to do was to put the “philosophical” approach behind you for good and go strictly technical and pragmatic: build your white hat empire into a solid future, pay your monthly bills from black hat loot. You even could set yourself a timetable for that: from the start of each month you do black until the bills are paid, for the rest of the month you play white. Try this for a year and see what worked and felt best for you.