Difference Between White, Grey & Black Hat SEO

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30 August 2013
Comments: 10
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White Hat, Black Hat & Grey Hat SEO Explained by Xpress Web Marketing

Once upon a time, sooner or later, you will come across the terms white and black hat SEO. What are they? Could you be doing, without knowing it, Black Hat SEO? What are the shades between white and black? So many questions, especially when it comes to backlinks. Let me try to answer some of them.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and encompasses everything from content writing to web site design and driving traffic, via different methods, to your website. It means, in a nutshell, to make it as easy as possible for people to find your website via the search engines. To make the most out of this, you have first to understand how a search engine works and what a search engine wants.

The goal of every search engine, its purpose in life so to speak, is to serve the best search result for each query. For example, if somebody is looking to buy a certain product, they want to find a website that sells it. If somebody is looking for information about a certain subject, they want to find an informational article about it. And in both cases, they want to find a useful website that provides what they are looking for and not a spammy site that has been just quickly thrown together in hope to make a quick buck with it. The search engines know that and apply a lot of different methods to determine the quality of the websites in their index, i.e. the potential search results. SEO is the method used of convincing the search engines that a website is really the best result for a certain search query and topic. Now to the different color shades of SEO.

White Hat SEO

                             White Hat SEO is when a website is really the best result for a search about the topics website and you do everything to strengthen this impression. This includes providing descriptions for the search engines to make it easier for them to determine what your site is all about, a site map for easier crawling by the bots and a good site navigation for visitors and search engines alike. This SEO methods are beneficial and help the websites to rank stable and consistently for a variety of search terms. White Hat SEO = Long Term Success.

Here at Xpress Web Marketing we strictly follow Google Webmaster Guidelines for SEO and we work under White Hat Strategies.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO is if your website is not the best match for a search query, for example because of low quality of the content or because it consists mainly of ads, and you try to convince the search engines with shady methods that this is not the case. Black Hatters use methods like showing different content to the search engines than to human visitors and link farming in order to rank their websites higher as they deserve. Search engines find out about this sooner or later and will de-index such sites completely. Black Hat SEO = Short Term Success.

But as we all know there is more than only black and white when it comes to viewing the world

Gray Hat SEO

Grey Hat SEO is when you try to improve your website’s ranking by measures that are not exactly snow white but also not outright malicious. A good example for this is back link building. Whilst Google does approve, to a certain extend, of a ‘content against link’ approach, such as in guest posting, it is against their policy to purchase links that pass PageRank or to self-link excessively. My personal take and experience with this is, that as long as your website content is great and a good source of information for the reader, Google is pretty happy with this. Remember, Google, and other search engines, want to have the best possible results on top of their search result pages, if your web site is such a great result, Google has, at least unofficially, nothing against if you try to get as many relevant quality links as possible to it.

Before you now decide what to do next, I strongly recommend that you first make sure that your site follows the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines to the dot. If you have optimized your content and design to provide the best user experience and to make the life of the search bots easier you can start building quality backlinks to it. Great resources for doing this you can find in the left sidebar of this website.

10 responses on “Difference Between White, Grey & Black Hat SEO

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