SEO Techniques: White Hat vs. Black Hat
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008When shopping for an SEO expert, you may want to ask what color hat the SEO company wears… a white hat or black hat? I know this question seems extremely crazy, but there really is such a thing as a white hat seo or black hat seo technique.
What’s the difference between white hat or black hat SEO?
Simple. White hat seo is the technique of optimizing your website for search engine indexing, without doing anything deceptive. White hat seo experts use ethical methods to getting your site listed with search engines, and do not try to ‘trick’ the search engines for top rankings.
Black hat seo is a deceptive practice that normally use techniques that search engines feel are spamming or just downright tricky. A black hat seo may be able to gain top rankings on keywords/phrases, but they are normally short lived as once the search engine finds out what they are doing, they can be banned from the search engine.
What types of techniques are considered black hat?
Hidden Text - This is a process of hiding text on a web page. For example, one type of hidden text is placing white text on a white background. The search engine sees the text as visible in the code, but the website browser does not. The black hat seo is trying to trick the search engine into reading text that is not visible on the page for a real visitor just to enhance their rankings.
Keyword Stuffing - This is a process where keywords are literally ’stuffed’ onto a page with nothing else on the page. For example, if I had a website for real estate, and all I had on the page was a bunch of keywords and no real content…this would be considered keyword stuffing.
Doorway Pages - Doorway pages are used to deceive the search engine because they are ‘fake’ pages that a user will never see. They are normally filled with keyword stuffed content just to try to fake out the search engines.
Although black hat methods can work…they normally are temporary and once found out, are banned from search engines. Don’t let these types of techniques tempt you into higher rankings. A well thought out, content rich website with white hat seo techniques will far outlast the black hats.