What is Black and White hat SEO?
To confuse you even more I will say, that there is even… gray hat SEO.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This covers the whole subject of making your website rank better than others in search engines.
It is commonly known, that only first 3 pages of search results give your website good exposure – so everybody wants to be there.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
In old Western movies, good guys wore white hats and bad ones wore black, to make them easier to distinguish from each other. I like to add old Tuco (the Ugly) into the mix and he is the gray hat guy. Not entirely bad, but certainly morally questionable.
Both White and Black SEO specialists try to do the same thing – make their customers’ sites rank better. While White Hats do this by following the search engines’ recommendations, the Black Hats do whatever they can to manipulate the results.
What is the difference for you?
As a website owner you should be aware, that Black Hat techniques, if detected, result in penalties. In Google it is downgrading or removing your site from the catalog. Results of such penalty are disastrous.
Getting the site back on track is very difficult and may take months.
Good news are, that there is little you can do yourself to earn a penalty. Keyword stuffing (excessive use of a keyword in your copy) would be the most common thing. What is excessive use? Well, the day I learn it will be the day when I become a millionaire.
Search engines do not give definite guidelines. They say “write for readers, not for search engines”.
Your results in search engines are greatly affected by the number of pages that link to your site. This is another area, where black hats are active.
You have to know, that for search engines links carry something called “link equity”. It is like a vote for website they point to. To affect search engine results, it is beneficial to have many inbound links (linking to your site), preferably from quality sites relevant to yours.
If you have a blog and ever wondered why all those lovely people are so keen to comment on your posts with Chinese proverb or some irrelevant stuff – this is black SEO activity called blog spam.
They set up automated programs that add comments just to obtain a link to their website. Those links have very little value (sometimes just none), so they need loads of them.
They sometimes devise elaborate, multi-level funneling schemes, where all spammy links point to semi-legitimate, “gray” website, and the gray ones point to their customer’s site.
If you are in the trade that can be advertised by legitimate means, you are not selling fake watches or medicines, you should stay away from black hat SEO.
This is especially important, when you are hiring a SEO company or consultant. You should know, what exactly they are going to do.
