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SEO – White Hat – Grey Hat – Black Hat

David Correll on February 7, 2012 | SEO | Comments (8)

In the SEO world, you may often hear the terms:

White Hat
Grey Hat
Black Hat

But what exactly does this mean?

White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO refers to legitimate and ‘proper’ ways to search engine optomise your website.

This is ethical SEO and utilises tactics allowed by the search engines such as:

Internal Linking
Title Tag and Description optimisation
Content Creation to attract inbound links
Guest Blogging for author links
On Page Keyword optimisation

Grey Hat SEO

Grey Hat SEO falls under the ‘questionable’ category for search engine optomisation. This is not the ethical way to SEO your site, but it is not considered search engine spam, yet. You may be able to get away with Grey Hat tactics and avoid search engine penalties but members of the web community may realise what you are doing and this could effect your online reputation.

Some Grey Hat SEO tactics include:

Buying links for PageRank
Duplicating Content on your website
Cloaking
Reciprocal link exchanges

It’s no secret some of these tactics can improve your search engine ranking, but these are questionable methods and you will get much better results if done via White Hat methods.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO refers to illegitimate optimisation ttactics designed for stronger and more immediate search ranking improvements. This often involves manipulative behaviour and the search engines will penalise or ban websites that undertake this behaviour.

Some Black Hat SEO tactics include:

Keyword stuffing
Invisible Text
Cloaking pages, ie showing different pages to the search engines than humans.
Doorway pages
Manipulative Redirects
Duplicate content/ websites

Conclusion

It’s important for your business or your clients that you adhere to ethical and White Hat SEO practices – Grey or Black Hat could damage their website ranking and your reputation.

Creating great content that people will link to – in my experience is the most powerful white hat seo strategy you can undertake – which also yields the best results.

Our Social Media Agency offers advanced White Hat link building plans – we think some of the best value packages available by an Australian supplier.