What is your SEO Hat white, gray or black?
Most of the time people do not understand what are the differences between SEO hats? Sometimes they do not even know the existing types of SEO hats. Ok, I admit that they may know the two famous ones – The Black and the White Hat SEO.
On this post we will do our best to define all the existing SEO Hats and few of the used technics that they use to be wear a specific hat.
SEO Hat types
There are the two extremes black and white hats; these are the two known hats. However there are some experts who opted for remaining in between by wearing another hat different from the existing the Grey Hat SEO.
White Hat SEO
The White Hat SEO is the kind of practices that every SEO expert should adopt to avoid being blacklisted. These practices, in theory, are what search engines indicate and what webmasters and SEO expert should tiptoe. Search engines communicate to us the best practices that we should apply and follow to adopt our website to their bots. These criteria vary between online and offline practices. In few words, White Hat SEO is based on those practices that obey search engines guidelines.
- Unique and pertinent content to every specific website.
- Naturel link building.
- Respecting keywords density and let them appear naturally within the website.
- Updating the website with new content at least once a week.
- …etc.
Most of the time, webmasters start respecting and applying search engines guidelines. They follow them, but they don’t reach the expected results, especially for a short period which means that they have failed. Then, most of them start a new journey, seeking new ways to get traffic as fast as possible. They start experiencing banned ways to rank. Unfortunately they succeed to get the wished results. As a result, their SEO Hat begins changing color till it turns to be black completely.
The gray Hat SEO
The Gray Hat SEO as the color may indicate, it is a mixture between the two (white and black). Yes, it is the middle way between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. Being a gray hat SEO is to mix the two to get results as fast as possible and avoid being blacklisted as much as possible. The Gray Hat SEO experts tend to use questionable technics; technics that search engine are frowning on but necessarily against their rules like the two following examples:
- Building a website by following search engine guidelines combined with links buying.
- Building a good website and optimizing few pages to respond to specific needs to drive more traffic by adding more keywords and external links.
The Black Hat SEO
Webmasters who wear Black Hat SEO do not hold on to reach their aims as fast as possible while White Hat SEO experts rely on patient and long-term strategy. What is too interesting is that the Black Hat SEO experts know a lot over search engines; surely White Hat SEO experts do so too. However, Black Hat SEO learns more over SEO bugs and how to exploit mischievously search engines’ guidelines. For example:
- Using hidden content.
- Backlinks buying.
- Keywords stuffing.
- Cloaking.
- Doorway pages.
- …etc.
In few words, Black SEO is the foxy scheme of using the search engines’ guidelines.
There are too many ways to cheat and to fool search engine to rank for specific keywords. However, Black Hat SEO practices will actually lead to short-term gains in terms of rankings. If you think about using them at least avoid the old practices and try to learn more over search engines’ guidelines and bugs. Do not use a spamming technique for a long time because search engine are evaluating and progressing and there are too many engineers working days and nights to discover their weak points.
To finish this post, I just want to add that we, SEO experts, are suffering from a big dilemma. That is to say, webmasters or SEO experts can be today White Hat SEO and tomorrow they will be banned and considered as Black Hat SEO. They said that these changes are due to the fact that search engine are changing their algorithms to be more pertinent vis-a-vis their users. But, are they seeking users satisfactory or to attract more announcers or is it just a win-win politics?
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Excellent overview of SEO hat colours, although it would be worth adding some information about negative SEO too, which can be white hat, black hat or grey hat depending on your negative SEO methods.
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Great information there, I have always wondered the right way to go about this, thanks for showing me! Great view of SEO hat colours, although it would be worth adding some information about negative SEO too, which can be white hat, black hat or grey hat depending on your negative SEO methods.
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