The good, the bad, and the ugly. Well, only one of them is ugly. White and black hat SEO are pretty straightforward to figure out. One is good, one is bad.
White hat is the good one. The ethical one, the one that won’t get your website penalised. Black hat is full of horrible tricks, and exists only to trick search engines and ruin a user’s overall web experience.
Black hat tactics are sneaky. If you use them in an online campaign, even unwittingly, then the chances are that search engines will punish you accordingly. Search engines look favourably on white hat and ethical SEO techniques, and will reward you for following the rules. But how do you know which ones are which?
They’re pretty easy to spot. It’s like most things in life – you wouldn’t take a bite out of a rotten-looking apple, would you? Most of it is down to common sense.
Keyword stuffing content, putting hidden text on your page with the font the same colour as the background, hidden ‘doorway’ pages. These are all black hat tactics that will get you punished should you incorporate them into a web campaign. If anything looks out of place and that it may not belong, then it more than likely doesn’t.
Black hat tactics were everywhere in the mid-to-late 90s when amateur coders realised they could manipulate search engines to get higher up the rankings. There were a multitude of search engines out there compared to the ‘big three’ today of Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
But as the internet continued to grow, so did the influence of search engines and their technologies. Websites that tried to get higher up rankings with black hat methodology were severely penalised. White hat SEO was encouraged, with search engines such as Google giving tips and advice on how to ethically streamline a web presence.
White hat techniques are ethical and promoted by the best SEO companies. They are designed to enhance the searchers’ overall experience whilst also helping websites to become better categorised in the eyes of search engines. White hat methods are there to enhance the search experience and to serve the end user. Quality content on your pages, making sure that you don’t have any links on your site leading to broken pages, optimising your META titles and tags and more are white hat, and help offer seamless interaction between searchers and the overall internet.
The bottom line is that using white hat results in the long term will get you proven results. Using black hat techniques for short-term success will only sully your reputation, and do you more harm than good.