White-hat-versus-black-hat

White hat versus black hat

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SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve. The search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing. Some industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend 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.

An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Black Hat

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Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review. Infamous examples are the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices.and the April 2006 removal of the PPC Agency BigMouthMedia. All three companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.

Many Web applications employ back-end systems that dynamically modify page content (both visible and meta-data, for example the page title or meta-keywords) and are designed to increase page relevance to search engines based upon how past visitors reached the original page. This dynamic search engine optimization and tuning process can be (and has been) abused by criminals in the past. Exploitation of Web applications that dynamically alter themselves can be poisoned.

Gray hat techniques

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Gray hat techniques are those that are neither really white nor black hat. Some of these gray hat techniques may be argued either way. These techniques might have some risk associated with them. A very good example of such a technique is purchasing links. The average price for a text link depends on the page rank of the linking page.

While Google is against sale and purchase of links there are people who subscribe to online magazines, memberships and other resources for the purpose of getting a link back to their website.

Another widely used gray hat technique is a webmaster creating multiple 'micro-sites' which he controls for the sole purpose of cross linking to the target site. Since it is the same owner of all the micro-sites, this is a violation of the principles of the search engine's algorithms (by self-linking) but since ownership of sites is not traceable by search engines it is impossible to detect and therefore they can appear as different sites, especially when using separate Class-C IPs.

The Difference Between Black Hat SEO And White Hat SEO

In order to illustrate the difference between white hat and Black Hat SEO techniques or methods it is best to summarize how each is aimed at either search engines or humans. White hat techniques will make sense even if search engines weren’t involved while Black Hat Techniques are useless without them.

Black hat Content & links are aimed at search engines.
White hat content & links are aimed at humans

Black hat techniques are invisible to humans.
White hat techniques are visible to humans

The quality of black hat work is hidden.
The quality of while hat work is visible

Black hat sees search engines as their enemy.
White hat sees search engines as their ally

Black hat sees domains or branding as inconsequential.
White hat sees them as something to be nurtured

Black hat realizes short term results. Black hat employs unethical techniques.

White hat realizes long term results. White hat employs only ethical techniques