White Hat and Black Hat SEO techniques

The White Hat search engine optimisation (SEO) and Black Hat SEO debate is gathering momentum as SEO becomes increasingly important in the success achieved by websites. As White hat SEO techniques follow the general guidelines of search engines, they are considered ethical techniques and are therefore viewed positively by the major search engines.

On the other hand black hat techniques are those short term tactics that web architects adopt to ‘fool’ search engine crawlers into believing things that may not actually exist on their websites e.g. backdoor ‘cloaking’ and artificially boosting backlinks from link farms (dummy webpages with bogus links). As these are generally un-ethical they are not accepted by search engines and they can result in your website being banned or penalised sites for the use of black hat techniques.

White hat and black hat SEO are two different and generally opposing views on how to carry out effective search engine optimisation. White hats are those website architects that ‘play nice’ and are prepared to wait for long term results to build their site popularity. Black hats are those website designers that want to quickly boost their search engine rankings by cutting corners and are ready to compromise even the readability and content coherence of their sites in the race for better SEO results.

It is not surprising that all search engines today are actively monitoring for black hat SEO techniques as these practices ultimately harm their search result reputation as these websites are not delivering a positive user experience.

Choosing between white hat and black hat

The most important point to emphasise is that Google and major search engine do not consider ethical SEO efforts to be spam. The major search engines rely on ethical SEO companies to provide users an optimal web experience. 

Search engines only consider SEO spam when the site is not operating within their quality guidelines and indulges in such activities as hidden links, hidden text, cloaking and sneaky redirects.  You can view a complete list of Google webmaster guidelines at: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

The majority of the SEO companies adopt a common-sense approach in making your website user friendly and at the same time ensuring that the site’s architecture is easily accessible to search engine spiders. 

In simple terms, SEO is about designing your website based on what people search for, which makes perfect business sense. Taking short cuts or resorting to black hat techniques may actually confuse the readers and in the long run annoy search engine bots.

The general consensus is that Internet users are increasingly beginning to believe that white hat SEO actually translates into a great website plan and design. Whilst Black hat techniques rely on unmindful aggression akin to gambling – so while you might gain a lot quickly, you are at risk to loose all and more (banned for ever) just as quickly as search engines are now more sophisticated than ever.

For a serious business who wants to be successful in the long term and popular consistently, there should be no reason to gamble on black hat techniques. It has generally been observed that those Internet marketers that let their dark-side dominate by adopting black hat techniques often regret it later. 

Our advice is don’t get lost in the technical detail of SEO. Keep it simple, know what your customers are searching for on the Internet, design your site to communicate with their search activity, deliver superior value and online success will be yours.