The Differences Between White and Black Hat SEO

There are two types of methods in the world of search engine optimization. White hat methods only focus on the use of strategies that focus on a human audience. Black hat tactics are those that abuse the way that search engines work. Top search engines like Google and Bing continue to penalize sites that don’t use ethical tactics. Keeping search engine tactics on the up and up can help to improve the ranking of your website.

Black Hat vs White Hat SEO

Take a look at the difference between these two different schools of thought before deploying any strategies on your own site.

White Hat Tactics

Optimization strategies that focus solely on attracting a strong human audience fall under the white hat banner. These are many of the tactics that you’re probably already familiar with. You probably already know how to conduct a keyword analysis and use keywords to get a search engine to latch onto your site.

Link building and improving link popularity is also a good white hat technique when it’s done correctly. Getting other sites to link back to you can improve your ranking in search engine results pages. Nevertheless, there’s an ethical way to do this that has to be adhered to.

Black Hat Tactics

Any strategies that rely solely on attracting search engines fall under the black hat heading. Consider the issue of link building. Search engines look for sites that have plenty of internal links that don’t attempt to force any keywords. If a page is filled with informative content, then it could help to improve rankings by having links back to the home and about pages.

Black hat designers often try to abuse this by filling in tons of links that are based on what keywords popped up in their keyword analysis. They might also attempt to generate dozens of pages with identical copy in order to get at least some of these mentioned in the rankings. While these tactics might work for a short period of time, they’re not ethical.

Google and Bing publish guides that state precisely what they rate down for. Eventually these sorts of tactics will get a site penalized and shoved down in the rankings.

Fortunately there’s hope for webmasters who have pages that have been rated down. According to the experts, natural white hat techniques that are approved by the search engines can help to have penalties removed. Sites can then start to appreciate in the rankings once again.

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