You may be familiar with the concepts of using White Hat and Black Hat SEO techniques.
The truth is there's a fuzzy grey area that inhabits the middle ground. To clear up any confusion, we'll look at all the SEO hats in question: black, white and all the shades of grey hat SEO in between.
White Hat vs Black Hat vs Grey Hat SEO
With each Google algorithm update, the goal posts keep shifting. So, how do you know what exactly works for your search engine marketing efforts?
There's a lot of misunderstandings we'll try to cover in this article, to help you understand better what really matters to rank your website.
The Origins of White Hat and Black Hat SEO
Way back in the 1920s, the audiences of Western movies could tell in an instant who was the good guy, and the baddie. The hero always wore a white hat, and the villain had a black hat.
Ever since those times, this lingo has been used in different industries. For search engine optimization, it's been adapted into White hat SEO (the knight in shining armor, riding his trusted steed) and Black hat SEO (the one-eyed ogre inhabiting the deepest, darkest recesses of the web space).
Just remember, not all SEOs are cowboys!
What is White Hat SEO?
White hat SEO means doing search engine optimization by following the guidelines of the main search engines, including Google. These are those long-term strategies where you're thinking about that end user, that you nurture and build over time.
You won't see results in the first week. It may take months, depending on your industry, to outrank your competitor. But the eventual outcome is you'll have more stable and longer-term results, and more organic traffic.
White Hat SEO Techniques
Here's a summary of how Google wants websites to be optimized.
Quality Content Marketing
Creating high quality content that's focused on the user is important. Without great content, people won't read and share it.
With over 7.5 million blog posts published every single day, your content needs to stand out. People will only link to you if they see what a valuable resource you've created.
User Experience
If your content is poorly written (with bad spelling and grammar), it's hard to read (text too small for a mobile user) or takes forever to load, this creates a bad user experience. A poor-quality user experience which leads to people bouncing off the site, also reduces your chances of ranking higher.
This means that you need to build a useful website that follows all of Google guidelines like loading fast, mobile friendly and with a good website architecture.
A website with a great architecture will improve how both search engine crawlers and users navigate their way through your site. Ideally, a visitor should reach any page in as few clicks as possible. This lowers the bounce rate, keeping them on the site for longer. This is important as both bounce rate and engagement are SEO ranking factors.
Your content should match the search intent of the visitor. If someone is searching for "how to make pancakes" and they land on a sales page, they're not going to be too pleased. Instead, they should be presented with a solution to their problem or question. For instance, a "how to guide" with a recipe, ingredients and helpful tips and advice.
Your content shouldn't be just random fluff, but high quality, readable and relevant to the needs of your audience.
Relationship Building (aka Link Building)
This means building relationships in your industry, for example, with niche relevant blogs, industry associations, etc.
White hat SEO strategies will result in unique, quality backlinks which are generated from providing value to the visitor, not hundreds of spammy links.
These are the same techniques used in our white hat link building services work.
White Hat SEO Example
An example of a white hat website is: https://www.familyhandyman.com/list/super-simple-ways-to-save-on-energy-costs/
This page provides useful advice to the visitor about saving energy in your home. The article is a content hub, and one of the best resources for that topic. Each sub-topic links out to a more in-depth article on the same site. The high-quality content is user-focused, which means it will likely attract natural backlinks from other websites. Even though some of the content has affiliate links and ads, it still provides a lot of value to the reader.
Most big, corporate websites follow white hat strategies, because they don't want to get hit with any google penalties.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is when you use techniques that find loopholes in search engines, that break their Terms of Service. It may well work at first, but it's a short-term strategy.
Is going black hat illegal? Google isn't the internet police. So, you won't face jail time, unless of course you hack into a government website!
Yes, these darker SEO tactics are risky. At most, they could get your site penalized. If you've spent months of hard work and built hundreds of pages, it could all suddenly be reduced to rubble.
Ultimately, it's the search engines that decide what criteria must be met to rank on it. Google's regular algorithm updates mean it's getting harder for Black hatters to manipulate the search results.
Google's Guidelines
Google's algorithm uses 200 distinct factors to rank a website in the organic search results, from click-through rate and page load time to backlinks. You can dig into Google's rules, to know exactly what Google is looking for, then optimize a new website to rank.
If you want to really know what Google allows and frowns upon, you can read their guidelines. They provide detailed documentation called the Webmaster Guidelines. The "Avoid the following techniques" section are specific things that Google expressly prohibits for your website. These are all black hat SEO tactics: "automatically generated content, participating link schemes, creating pages with little or no original content, cloaking, sneaky redirects, hidden text, doorway pages, scraped content, etc. If you create a website that follows each guideline it will help more visitors find your pages and read your content.
Black Hat SEO Techniques
Black Hat Link Building
Google classes a 'Link scheme' as links designed for the purposes of manipulating PageRank or a site's search rankings. So, any of the following black hat tactics are against Google's guidelines as they're designed to cheat the system.
Footer Links
This is when you place a ton of links to other sites in a website's footer section. In most cases, the footer is replicated on multiple pages, so it provides no real benefit.
Comment Spam
Many sites have a "Comments" section, which Black hatters abuse by writing comments that are not valuable and placing spammy links to their website.
Overused Anchor Text
By using the same anchor text in all backlinks, you're trying to make a site rank for that keyword. For example, using commercial keywords (e.g., best XYZ) in the anchor text of most backlinks.
Low quality Social Bookmarking and Directory Listings (Automated)
Social media spam involves making posts with spammy links to your site on multiple social media platforms. Low-authority directory submissions mean using software to submit your site to 100’s of low-quality directories that are not relevant for your industry.
Black Hat Content SEO
Google's Webmaster Guidelines recommend that you create information-rich, unique content that adds value for users. Using irrelevant keywords by 'stuffing' them on a web page or automatically generated content designed to manipulate search engine rankings is not only unnatural but breaches Google's Guidelines.
Keyword Stuffing
What keyword stuffers will do is use the same keyword, multiple times within the content, to rank for it. The tactic of overloading keywords into the text may have worked well a decade ago. But today, search engine algorithms will crack down on this, demoting your website's content whilst favoring higher quality, more useful content.
Duplicated (or Plagiarized) Content
If you are continually copying (aka 'stealing') the same material with only a few words changed, you'll eventually suffer a drop in rankings.
For example, a page copied and pasted from Wikipedia onto your web page. Google is smart enough to know you're copying the content.
Auto Generated Content
For example, if you type your mobile number into Google, you will see lots of websites whose only content are huge lists of mobile numbers. When you click on a number, it shows the same or remarkably similar, auto-generated dummy content for each number.
Spinning Content
Search engines work by devouring new, fresh and unique content. This tactic involves rewriting someone else's content (automatically or manually), to avoid duplicate content-related issues.
Engineers created article spinning software to solve this problem, which can quickly churn out a ton of content. Even though the final result is often packed with errors or nonsensical, people still publish these articles. In many cases, Google algorithms are wise enough to detect poor quality, spun content, and flag it.
Hidden Content (or Hidden Links)
Black hatters hide content (or links) by using certain shady techniques. For instance, using white text on a white background, or a tiny font size. This makes the text invisible to the human eye, but still readable by the search engine crawlers. This may have worked in the past, but Google quickly caught onto this trick.
Black Hat SEO (Other)
Cloaking
This is showing one page to search engine bots (like Google bot) and showing a different page to humans.
Sneaky Redirects
You may have searched for something, but when you click on the link in the search results, you are redirected to a completely different website than the one you're expecting.
Doorway Pages
This is a page created to rank for a particular search query. Usually, multiple pages with duplicate content on the same site exist.
For example, a visitor will see what appear to be completely different brands in the search results, but no matter which link they click, they'll still be taken to the same destination, confusing them.
Hacked Website
Cyber-attacks are a malicious form of hacking, where a competitor's website is attacked through a brute force hack, malware or virus. If a site has been injected with malicious code, Google may penalize the website by blocking it from their search engine. Or labeling it in the search results as a "hacked" site. This means the site would lose the trust of any visitors and suffer a drop in rankings and valuable search engine traffic. Not only is this unethical, but in some cases, illegal.
Another method of hacking involves placing hidden content which links to the site being promoted. This is also called parasite hosting.
What is Grey Hat SEO?
By now, you may well be asking "Do I always need white hat SEO?"
Well, mainly "yes". But some industries are themselves black hat, so you'll need to use slightly darker SEO tactics to even stay competitive in the search rankings.
Grey hat SEO (or gray hat SEO) is an interesting concoction of both white hat and black hat techniques. Google may not have expressly prohibited these tactics, but there's still a risk of being penalized. Though, any risks can be minimized if you know what you're doing. Effectively, grey hat SEO is black hat SEO disguised as white. It lies on the border of what's permissible by the major search engines, and what's not.
Why Does Gray Hat SEO Matter?
Gray Hat SEO is important as it has the potential to improve your site's search engine rankings, without there being any negative consequences. Like the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert, it's an ever-changing field. What's classed as gray hat SEO could be White hat (or Black hat) in 12 months from now.
Read on, to learn some of the most popular gray hat search engine optimization strategies still used today.
Greyhat SEO Techniques
Buying or Selling Links
This grey hat SEO technique has various forms: buying a link within an existing article, buying a blog post placement, or trading a product or service in return for a link.
Not all paid links go against Google's guidelines. If the links are not created to manipulate the search results, they should show that they're for advertising purposes, using the rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" attribute in the html code.
In the real world, buying links is still popular, with large publications masking the tactic under the "sponsored post" label.
Native Advertising
Content created just for getting backlinks may well contravene Google's guidelines. But, if you write relevant content and it's valuable to visitors, could it really be considered against the guidelines? It's a gray area.
Here's an excellent example of native advertising: Netflix article on Orange is the new black. The content is so ingrained within the website's content, it fits in naturally with the rest of the content.
Link Exchanges
This is when you exchange links with one or more websites. For instance, website A links to website B, then website B links back to website A. Most people think a link exchange is a black hat SEO technique. In fact, it's a grey hat strategy. Build a list of relevant blogs in your niche, reach out, and offer to provide high-quality content for their visitors. Other webmasters will reciprocate if your website can create unique value for their readers.
Private Blog Networks (PBN's)
A Private Blog Network is a network of websites, used to build links to sites, to help them rank higher.
In essence, using these link networks is a black hat SEO strategy, as they are created purely to manipulate the search engine rankings. SEO's still use PBN's, because:
- building quality links is often difficult with no guaranteed results, and;
- it allows complete control over the link, from choosing the anchor text to the page they link out.
If you can build a PBN’s correctly with great content that are indistinguishable from real sites, then this is one of the grey hat SEO strategies that can still work.
Micro-Sites or Micro-Blogs
This little-known technique is like a PBN, but safer, as it's a completely private network. Essentially, you're creating a handful of mini niche-relevant authority sites, where you regularly create high quality content. Where appropriate and relevant, they would link to the main site you're promoting.
This is closer to white than grey hat SEO, as it's virtually undetectable.
Upgrading Old Content or Low Value Content
It's a common SEO practice, to write content purely for ranking purposes, with enough keywords to drive visitors to the page, but not adding much value. Is this considered to be against the real spirit of the search engine guidelines?
For example, say you have a 1,000-word blog post, but the average content length of your competitor's pages is 2,000+ words. It makes sense for you to upgrade your article by making it longer form. You can also make the content for users, so it's more engaging, more readable, and easily digestible. This gray hat SEO technique will lower bounce rates, increase your user engagement and boost your chances of ranking.
Using Expired Domains
Some people buy an expired domain, because it has some existing domain authority (sometimes with hundreds of links). They then either build a site, using its previous content (and/or new content), or 301 redirect it to a new site. This can help you launch a website that already has a lot of authority and traffic from search engines, compared to starting from scratch.
Paying for Positive Reviews
Getting honest reviews usually takes a lot of time. You won't be able to accumulate hundreds of five-star ratings, right after launching a new website. So, some businesses resort to the rather shady tactic of paying for glowing reviews. As it's hard to detect by any search engine algorithm, it's a grey hat approach.
Negative Competitor SEO
Some SEOs want to destroy a competitor's reputation using negative SEO campaigns, rather than working on their own SEO strategy.
This typically involves building spammy or low-quality backlinks, creating fake reviews or leaving fake customer complaints online.
Simply relying on the demise of your competitors is a very short-sighted marketing strategy.
If you’re using this in your marketing, it’s not only shady but downright unethical. By focusing on your own SEO campaigns, you will benefit a lot more in the long run.
Risk vs Reward
Whether you implement white, black, or gray hat SEO techniques, they all carry inherent risks.
With white hat SEO tactics your risk is them not working. In a highly competitive niche, other websites using gray or black hat methods may outrank you. Imagine spending months creating great content and links, with no return on investment.
If you're contemplating turning to the darker side, here's a few considerations. Black hatters constantly face the risk of manual penalties from Google, like de-indexing or losing rankings. Wearing a gray hat means you could be penalized in future. You're constantly looking over your shoulder.
You may be thinking: "Is the risk worth the reward?".
As a marketer, you'll need to decide on the opportunity costs of donning the grey cape and hat. For instance, if you offer professional SEO services to clients, you wouldn't dream of doing anything black, or even grayish hat SEO - unless you were fully transparent about the risks.
Ultimately, it's your choice.
Whether you're choosing the white-hat route, the black-hat route or the latest grey hat tactics for your website, understand the real risks and long-term results.