SEO Black Hat and White Hat

What’s the difference between Black Hat and White Hat SEO?

The terms black hat and white hat are taken from those good old black and white cowboy films where the only way to differentiate between the goodies and the baddies was by the colour of their outfits The cowboys who were the goodies wore white clothes and hats and the cowboys who were the baddies were dressed in black clothes and hats!

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO is the use of unethical SEO techniques to cheat and fool the search engines by trying to manipulate their listings by under-hand means but it rarely works for long as the search engines are constantly on the look-out for it. Some of these black hat techniques include (and should be avoided at all costs):

Black Hat - Keyword Stuffing

This is a trick of trying to fill a website page with lots and lots of your selected keywords in an attempt to achieve a higher page listing.

Black Hat - Page Cloaking

Page cloaking is another trick of trying to feed search engine spiders text which is different to that which your website visitor sees. This practice is extremely dangerous as it can get you banned from some search engines.

Black Hat - Hiding Content

Hiding content on a website is another trick - i.e. white text on a white background which cannot be seen by website visitors but can be seen by the spiders. This text is then stuffed full of keywords.

Search engines are fighting back against black hat SEO and their spiders are constantly checking for these practices. Even if your website gets to the top of the results page using black hat teqniques you won’t be there for long and the consequences are simply not worth it. Failure to adhere to ethical optimisation will result in your website being penalised or worse still – it can blacklisted from search engine results pages. Don’t do it!

What is White Hat SEO?

This is the opposite of black hat SEO. White hat SEO is the use of ethical search engine optimisation techniques i.e. those which are deemed to be honest, legal and acceptable methods for both a website’s on-page and off-page content.

What about submitting my website to the Search Engines?

Yes this can help, but make sure you or your web designer submits your website manually and only once after each major change to the content. A search engine will not visit more often if your website is constantly submitted and it may even ignore your request.

Search engines must trust your website - once they do - your listing results will improve.

NB: this simplistic overview of black hat and white hat SEO is designed to provide a basic understanding of how search engines function without technical jargon.

 

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