White Hat SEO Versus Black Hat SEO
In short white hat SEO are techniques approved by Google and the other search engines and black hat SEO tactics are not approved and can get you black balled from organic search results. White hat SEO tends to be more natural in its content. Search engine index algorithms try to minimize the effects of any black hat SEO in their search results.
White hat SEO tends to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.
Google SEO has a series of guidelines that it prefers be followed, if you follow these practices you’ll stay on the right side of white hat SEO. Black hat typically involves some level of deception and typically will not be in accordance with the search engine rules. Following guidelines ensures that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. Black Hat SEO couldn’t care less as long as their site ranks on the 1st page of search results.
White hat SEO advises that you create content for your site visitors and not search engines and than making that content easily accessible to the spiders. Black Hat SEO tends to try and trick the search engine spiders into make believe content just to receive more website traffic.
Black hat SEO will do anything to improve rankings, in all cases they are not approved by the search engines. Some examples of this are:
- Hidden text colored similar to the background
- Invisible text in a div tag
- Text positioned off screen
- Cloaking the search engines by delivering one page humans and a different page to bots.
- Buying links
Google and the other search engines will penalize websites they discover using any of these and other black hat methods. You will find your page rank dropping or maybe even totally eliminated from their index.
Gray hat SEO techniques
As you might guess, Gray hat SEO is in between black and white. In general, gray hat SEO techniques may not get you in trouble, but I’d stay away from them. Purchasing links happens to be one of these, Google frowns on it but they do have to catch you? So is subscribing to an online magazine or a site membership that gives a link back to your website OK, you decide?
Self linking is also frowned upon by the search engines. Many webmasters will create a bunch of sites and then link to a target site. Because they are different sites, it’s almost impossible for the search engines to recognize this strategy…. Today?
Best bet is to just keep it clean with White Hat SEO.
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