black hat and white hat seo

Firstly a preliminary question – why on earth are they called ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ in the first place? Well, the answer to that is that these are simply internet slang terms for an ethical security expert and  a malicious or selfish hacker. Naturally, these labels have been applied to the world of Search Engine Optimization. 

The white hat SEO (which can also stand for ‘search engine optimizer’) does not abuse the search engine system. They promote the methods that benefit accurate search engine results.

So examples of what the white hat would focus on would be:

• Keyword research
• Relevant keyword usage (no keyword stuffing) especially within Titles and Page Descriptions (uniqueness plays a large part here too)
• Effective image optimization or labeling
• An impressive quantity of continuous, high quality, original, non-copied content
• Entertaining, non-offensive viral content
• Also simply making sure the grammar and language of the site are easily readable and understandable.

So that is a simple list giving you just a sense of what the white hat SEO does.

In contrast, you can think of the black hat SEO practitioner like Walter White from Breaking Bad, who probably shouldn’t be cooking meth.

The black hat SEO, compared to the white hat, usually is found using the following:

• Duplicated content
• Invisible text and stuffed keywords
• wrongful ‘follow’ links (as opposed to no-follow links)
• Paid directory link building
• Automated blog spam
• Reciprocal link trading (and links from irrelevant sites)
• Automated content creation or generation
• ‘Cloaking’ – which is a redirection of an IP to another site that may have no relevance to the original site in the search engine results.
• Abuse of guest blogging (recently in SEO news)

These then are some of the practices that black hat SEO use and they are considered ‘bad’ because they are, in a word, deceptive.

Web search engines became more important as facilitators to market businesses/websites in regards to their organic (i.e. un-paid) search engine ranking, In the history of SEO tactics, both good and bad, started appearing.

These tactics are labeled ‘white hat’ SEO and ‘black hat’ SEO tactics, and they play an important part as to what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is today.