What’s the Difference: Black Hat SEO vs. White Hat SEO

Introduction

The search engine optimization world is constantly changing and new terms are popping out of thin air. In order to remain current and stay up to date, it is incredibly important to keep asking questions. Do not push things aside if there is something you do not understand. Two terms that are frequently tossed around but often remain unexplained are Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO. So really, what is the difference?

White Hat SEO tactics are strategies that are recommended by Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools). Black Hat SEO tactics are strategies that breach the search engine rules and target the search engine as opposed to the user. Black Hat SEO tactics are used to get a higher ranking on the search engine when users search for specific content. If you are caught using techniques from the Black Hat world, your website runs the risk of being banned from search engine results. Do not skip ahead to grow your site to have it excluded from the biggest traffic referral source on the internet.

White Hat SEO

The guidelines listed in Google Search Console provide recommendations on how to optimize your search engine rankings. Included are instructions for properly formatting your website. White Hat SEO strategies are strategies that specifically fall within these guidelines and do not breach any rules or regulations. These strategies specifically target the user and not the search engine. A good way to think of White Hat SEO techniques are ways to grow your business or company organically within search engines. Organic search results are results that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to the result appearing because of a paid advertisement.

Companies that focus on White Hat SEO technique focus on creating content for human readers. Examples of White Hat SEO are having keywords relevant to the content, keyword analysis and research, link building, and offering quality products and services. White Hat SEO is also called Ethical SEO. Companies and businesses interested in growing their site to a quality and trustworthy website will utilize techniques such as

Making the Website Mobile Friendly

Having a mobile friendly website is so important because as of January 2017, websites that do not have mobile friendly content will have lower rankings. It is simple to create a website that is accessible through a mobile, however, it is often forgotten or overlooked. If the question is, how do you know that the website is mobile friendly, Google Search Console has a great tool that you can use to test this. Log into your account, and view the Mobile Usability Report. The report will identify if there are any errors on the website such as:

• Flash Usage. Mobile browsers cannot display Flash-based content therefore limiting the user experience.
• Viewport Not Configured. Visitors will have varying screen sizes and the pages should adjust the content and size according to the user’s device
• Fix-width Viewpoint. The viewport is set a fixed width. Some web developers define the viewport to a fixed pixel size in order to adjust a non-responsive page to suit common mobile screen sizes. Adjusting the site-responsiveness to match the device’s scale and width will easily solve this error.

Use Descriptive, Keyword-rich Meta Tags

Meta tags are found within the webpage’s coding and they describe the content of the page. If you have ever had your own blog where you can add tags to describe the content of the post, meta tags are essentially the same thing. The only difference between tags within a blog post and meta tags are that meta tags are only visible to search engines or to people who know what they are looking for. To get the meta tags that are within a webpage, right-click anywhere on the page and select “view page source” and a popup will appear with the page details.

What meta tags look like within a browser

There are countless numbers of meta tags to use for your site but only certain tags will improve traffic generated through search engine results. The descriptions allow Google to know exactly what your website provides and directs the most relevant customers your way. Although there are tons of different tags, all SEO experts are familiar with four major meta tags.

• Meta Keywords Attribute — A series of keywords you deem relevant to the page in question.
• Title Tag — This is the text you’ll see at the top of your browser. Search engines view this text as the “title” of your page.
• Meta Description Attribute — A brief description of the page.
• Meta Robots Attribute — An indication to search engine crawlers (robots or “bots”) as to what they should do with the page.

Do NOT spam or stuff the meta tags full of words and descriptions; this will not help improve your traffic. This tactic will only flag your site as a Black Hat SEO user and will potentially cause your site to be banned. Search engines are always on the lookout for spammed or stuffed meta tags.

An example stuffed meta description using Black Hat SEO techniques for a pet store:

<meta name=”description” content=”Fiction Pets is the best pet store of all the pet stores. You’ve never seen a pet store like Fiction Pets. best pet stores, good pet stores, visit pet stores, contact pet stores”>

An example meta description using White Hat SEO techniques for the same pet store:

<meta name=”description” content=”Fiction Pets is an online pet store with a full line of pet supplies for dogs, cats, birds, fish and more. Our pet supply store can help you get everything you need for all of your pets.”>

Growing Popularity and Building Links

Links are an incredibly effective way to grow a site’s popularity and increased traffic. Backlinks or inbound links are links coming from another site to your own website.

Do not confuse outbound links (links from your website to another website) with internal links (links within your site)!

Backlinks are great ways to drive more traffic to your website and help increase ranking. Traffic levels rise through backlinks because they are essentially a referral from one party to you. I backlinked HubSpot’s post bringing more users to that page. If the link had not been there, you may not have visited the post at all. Using backlinks benefits your own site as well as the site you are referring; search engines see the links as proof that the website is an authority on a certain subject. The links increase trust, especially if the links direct users to other high authority webpages. The higher the trust from search engines, the higher the rank will be in search results. Never be afraid to link other websites within your own content as you are providing free advertising as well as making your own page more credible. I mean, we are all just trying to be better marketers, aren’t we?

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO goes directly against suggested Google Search Console guidelines. These tactics are used to specifically target search engine bots and increase rankings rather than creating content that is best suited for the user. People looking for a quick return on their site, instead of working towards growing a successful site, will gravitate towards these techniques. Getting a quick return sounds great especially given how difficult it is to get a business off the ground. However, using these strategies will end in your website getting banned from search engine results all together.

Aside from the negative side effects of having your site blacklisted on all search engines, there are other downfalls when misusing SEO techniques. The purpose of generating specific content, doing keyword research and using other optimization techniques is to attract the best suited user to the webpage. If your business is offering dog grooming services and within the meta description you have keywords like “haircut” or “barbershop”, there’s a likelihood users looking for a barbershop will see dog grooming services which is not your target audience. Do not waste your time or efforts. Some strategies to avoid include:

Duplicate Content

This is pretty self-explanatory. On your website, do not copy and paste content from another source. If the information you are providing is a fact and needs to be copy and pasted, then give credit to the original source. It’s not difficult to be a good person and providing backlinks makes your site more credible in the long run. Search engines look for sites with duplicate content. Just because one site has success with a certain layout does not mean your site will have instant success by duplicating the content.

Search engine bots have a more difficult time crawling and indexing content that already exists on another domain as the bots have difficulty choosing one site over the other. There are other risks including your website looking like a spam website because the traffic roots from content taken from other sources. There are so many reasons duplicate content should be avoided. Although there is nn direct penalty to plagiarizing content from other sites according to Google, it is a known fact that the search engine find more value in original content thus leading to a higher ranking.

Spam Comments

I’m sure we have seen these comments while visiting forums, watching YouTube videos and even on our Facebook pages. These comments usually look something like this:

“Awesome site! I love the layout of your blog. Very interesting photos. It would be cool if you could give my blog a look too. Give me a follow if you are interested too… http://myblogsite.com”

An example of what a spam comment can look like

The comment will begin with a message that is usually totally unrelated to the content, followed by a link promoting something again, unrelated. These comments are placed as an attempt to create free backlinks to the sites. These links are very obviously fake, however at times some users may accidentally click on it, having it contain a harmful virus and lead to more complications later on. It is safe to say this user will never be returning to this site from now on. This is the last thing you want users experiencing when visiting your site!

Spam comments make the page look highly unprofessional and make it seem as if the owner of the page has no regard of the comments left on the page. Some believe that any comment is a good comment because it gives the illusion that the site is generating an audience. However, you would rather have no comments than a fake one. It is simple to detect a bot commenting on any content as there is usually no prior contribution to the site, the information in the comment is not useful and it has been automatically generated.

Cloaking

When a user searches for something on a search engine, they expect to be shown content that is consistent across all means. However, cloaking is the act of providing different content to a human than what the search engine will see. By definition cloaking means that the web server is specially programmed to return different content to search engines than it returns to regular users, in an attempt to distort search engine rankings by making a cloak content.

Bots crawling and indexing sites will see different content than what humans will experience. Cloaking is strictly prohibited in Google Webmaster Guidelines because it deceives the user and does not provide the results the user was expecting to receive. Examples of cloaking include:

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users
• Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor

But what about Grey Hat SEO? Is it possible to land somewhere in the middle of both of these tactics and have an ethically correct way of optimizing your site?

Grey Hat SEO

There is a thick line between creating content for the user or targeting it towards getting better rankings on a search engine. Grey Hat SEO techniques are that middle line.

It is important to know the line between White Hat and Black Hat techniques as they could either cause no harm at all, or cause you to lose thousands of potential users. Grey Hat SEO techniques are not something that should be used haphazardly and should be consistently monitored as the guidelines on these techniques change frequently. One year a technique may be considered white hat and the next it could be a black hat technique. They are considered on the line between Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO because they are legal methods in improving traffic to your site but are not considered ethical by any means.

SEO Squatting

A lot of SEO is doing extensive research on keywords that relate to the product or service you are providing. Buying expired domains that are relevant to these keywords and creating some relevant content with backlinks to the original site will generate more traffic. The search engine bots will see this website and deem it trustworthy as it has relevant content along with backlinks to another trusted site. Not only will the popularity of the original site grow because of the backlinks, but users sent to this “squatted” domain will be redirected to the actual intended website.

Redesign the Website Frequently

This technique is definitely closer to a White Hat SEO technique as there does not seem to be anything harmful in keeping a website updated with fresh content. However, the search engine bots will not see it this way. Each time the site is updated, bots crawling the site will view it as new content. The content can be the same for all intents and purposes, as long as the code and text is changed. The bot will see it as a new site that should could be crawled and hopefully indexed.

There are various other techniques that you have probably come across yourself when looking for websites including paid reviews, fabricated news, fake social media accounts, charity links, the list goes on. If you are getting into SEO and are looking for new techniques to utilize to grow your search engine ranking, ensure you are aware of what you could potentially getting yourself into.

Conclusion

Trying to grow the online presence of your business is time consuming, expensive and difficult to get a grasp of. There are countless tools available to make managing online business as seamless as possible but the reality is that it will never be as easy as it may seem. Understand digital marketing and how it can benefit your company, but also understand the ways it can be detrimental to your brand.