What is white hat and black hat SEO?

SEO

How’s your poker face?

Good strategists, in for the long game, carefully select the bets (usually with limited bluffing), building up their pot little by little and being careful not to go in too big too soon.

Then there are those that just dive right in. Bet early and bet big (whether their hand is any good or not), and just hope they don’t get caught out when someone calls their bluff and then lose everything!

What is white and black hat SEO?

As in poker, there are different approaches to SEO. These two most polarised are called black hat and white hat SEO. White hat SEO plays by the rules, black hat SEO likes to bend and break them. Grey hat is everything in between!

Search engine optimisation can be a bit like playing poker with Google. Google plays this game with hundreds of millions of users though, so it sets out some clear rules to keep it fair.

However, these are just Google’s rules…they’re not laws. This means you can choose to follow them and play fair, but you can also choose to bend them or break them and hope that you can bet big enough to make it worth your while before Google notices and lands you with a penalty.

Now depending on the severity of the rule breaking, this might just be a (virtual) slap on the wrist, but it could lead to your site being penalised and not ranking well in the search results.

So, let’s look at the good the bad and the ugly of the SEO world…although not necessarily in that order. We’ll start with the bad and the ugly… black-hat SEO!

Which techniques are examples of black hat SEO?

There are lots of examples of black hat SEO and I can’t cover them all in this blog, however, I’ll give you a peek into some of them. All of them are aimed at boosting organic search by fraudulent means…it’s just a question of degrees.

The starting point is usually over-optimising your website and there are several ways to do this through black hat SEO.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing does pretty much what it says on the tin! It’s about overutilising key search terms in your text. However, Google has got pretty good at spotting this now, so its popularity has decreased markedly in the last few years. This technique might bring people onto your site, but it makes for a pretty terrible user experience once they are there. Imagine you have searched for “bouncy trampolines”.

How likely are you to stay on a landing page (let alone progress to buy anything), if the first text you are greeted by goes something like this:

“See our wide range of bouncy trampolines, they are the best bouncy trampolines on the market because we have decades of experience making bouncy trampolines. The reason our bouncy trampolines are such bouncy trampolines, is because of our patented bouncy trampoline technology, that makes for the world’s best bouncy trampolines.”

You get the point!

This can be done with HTML headings as well. Imagine reading a blog on this same site about bouncy trampolines, and having every heading in the text be “bouncy trampolines”…I don’t imagine you’d keep reading for very long.

Hidden Text

This has pretty much the same intent as keyword stuffing, but at least the customer experience is marginally better because the stuffed keywords are now hidden. This can be done by setting font size to zero, using white text on a white background, using CSS to set text off-screen etc. You can even add hidden text to Alt tags and metatags.

It’s not just keywords either, this is about link stuffing too. However, Google will cotton on to this quickly and deploy the big bad Panda to penalise your site. This can result in a huge drop in SERPs!

Irrelevant Keywords

I say it all the time, but relevancy is key in all aspects of SEO and content marketing. If you use irrelevant keywords just to boost your Google rankings, consumers will know and jump ship as soon as they land on your page. This will be true even if your product is something they may have been interested in any way; because not only have you presented them with irrelevant information for their current search…in doing so you have lost authority and their confidence.

Duplicate Content

Some techniques that are examples of black hat SEO relate purely to content. A site might steal content directly from another site (literally copy and paste) and present it as original. This is plagiarism in the online world, just as much as it is in the offline world and is known as Duplicate Content.

Article Spinning

Then there’s Article Spinning, which is really just one rung down from duplicate content. It involves re-writing a piece of copy (say a blog) but only marginally changing the content. This can be done with someone else’s copy (essentially just to avoid the duplicate content penalties), or it can be re-using your own material with only minor changes, to make it look fresh when in fact, you are not presenting users with any new information. This can also be done by AI making it even easier.

Just like in poker, sometimes the aim is misdirection. It’s against the rules to write content that’s aimed at search engines rather than users…but for some, it’s just too tempting a bluff.

Cloaking

Cloaking is very dishonest. It involves misusing two pieces of content. One is written for the Google spiders to crawl and index, and the other is written for the user. It can mean that the user ends up on a page completely unrelated to their original search.

Bait and Switch

This is sometimes called page swapping and can be confused with cloaking. Unlike cloaking though, it doesn’t utilise two separate pages, rather it creates a page with the express aim of being crawled and ranked highly for particular search terms, and then once it has been, the page is changed completely so the consumer ends up on a landing page or well-designed sales page…that has nothing to do with their original search.

We all know how important links are when it comes to climbing up the SERPs ladder; some techniques that are examples of black hat SEO, are solely devoted to links.

Link farms

I don’t know why but when I think of link farming, I think of the movie The Matrix. Link farms are just collections of websites that exist purely to increase the number of inbound links to your site.

To me, they seem just like the lines of code depicted on the screens of Neo and Morpheus’ ship, covered in hyperlinks that go to completely irrelevant and random sites, that have nothing to do with your product or service. These links are seen by Google as unnatural, and the spymasters at Googlebot HQ will penalise you heavily for using them.

It’s not exactly black hat to buy links. Lots of websites offer guest blogging for a fee (e.g. you can pay to have your content uploaded and a backlink to your site is given as part of the deal). If we return to our bouncy trampoline seller. If she wanted to buy a link, she would research reputable bouncy trampoline online publications (such as the exciting sounding “Bounce-away Monthly”) and request to guest blog for a fee in return for a backlink. That is a white hat technique. The website is legitimately connected with her industry, and she is legitimately contributing high-quality content to those users who are interested in her niche.

But, when that website is not connected with your industry at all, just a website that has no other purpose but to sell links, then you have a problem. You can normally tell these websites – there is no evidence of an actual product or service being offered (except the links) and they include topics from an enormous range of non-related topics. Avoid them!

URL Hijack

You can even Hijack a URL! This basically means that you take advantage of a domain name that is slightly misspelt but greatly resembles a genuine (and very popular site). For example, you might buy the domain name Disnay.com as opposed to Disney.com to take advantage of the traffic that will come through by accident. Increased traffic helps you climb the SERP but again, Google will usually find out and penalise you.

Most of the above are about finding loopholes in Google’s guidelines or just bending them a little. However, there are also lots of examples of outright illegal black hat SEO designed to make money quickly, but I won’t go into them here.

The main theme of all of this resembles the plot of a classic movie involving get-rich-quick initiatives, Ponzi schemes and con artists. Essentially, all of these black hat SEO methods are about getting results as quickly as possible and taking huge risks in the process.

Now, if you don’t care about your website being penalised by Google, maybe some of these methods might work for you, in the short term anyway. But what they won’t do is build trust and authority with either Google or the consumers you are hoping to reach. For that, for the long game…we need white-hat SEO.

White hat SEO

White hat SEO isn’t so much quality over quantity…it’s quality leading to quantity! Let me explain:

What is White hat SEO?

Whitehat SEO refers to all the techniques that Google approves of. Some of these include:

• Writing thoughtful, informative content that is designed for humans to read (not a search engine)
• Selecting relevant keywords and including them on pages that are relevant.
• Responding to journalist requests for quotes in return for a backlink to your site.

White hat SEO provides genuine, original, and relevant content. Links are formed organically or through genuine outreach methods and are therefore much more valuable. Keyword research is used organically too, with the relevant and right words used in the right way. Content is written for the benefit of the user…not the search engines.

1. You’ll build trust

You will be trusted, authoritative and liked, by users and search engines.

From my observations over the years around the poker table, I would have to say that the big bluffers nearly always overplay their hands and get caught out. Not only do they end up losing at poker by going all in while holding nothing more than a 2 pair; but when we tire of poker and get out battleships or monopoly…they are the ones that nobody trusts to play fair!

If users keep landing on your pages to find dreadful content, they’ll go elsewhere. As a business, high-quality content builds trust and helps convert users into leads.

2. You’ll be a source of information, not a copycat

Users will keep returning to your site for more information and updates. This will be great for your organic traffic and build your SERPs long-term. You also might get organic PR opportunities as a consequence if you develop a reputation as an authority within your niche. This will help grow awareness of your brand organically.

3. Your pages will convert

If you’re a business, your website needs to work to bring in sales. Poor quality content will stop users from converting into leads on your sales pages. High-quality content will encourage users along their customer journey and lead them to enquire.

Find out how good copywriting can lead to conversions.

FInd our how content can generate leads.

4. Your results will improve exponentially long-term

No matter how clever the Black hatters are, eventually Google cotton on. There will eventually be an update or penalty that gets you if you practice Black hat SEO. This might be ok for some, but if you’re a business that is really trying to build leads and sales long-term, you could face real problems when caught. 8.5 billion searches go through Google every day around the world. Do you really want to lose access to the potential clients that those searches represent?

White hat SEO might be harder work, but the results you get are exponential – that means they snowball. It’s hard to see the effect initially, but as time goes on your snowball can turn into an avalanche.

The results also last a long time. They don’t disappear instantly like the results from paid ads do.

White hat: the tortoise always wins

It may take longer to see the results, but this is a classic “tortoise and hare” story…slowly and carefully wins the race. White hat SEO might seem like an annoying goody-goody, but it’s done for a reason; it works and it builds sustainable growth.