What is Black Hat and White Hat SEO?

 

Ranking SEO Techniques: What is Black Hat and White Hat?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is on-going process that encompasses various tricks/techniques and concepts. Some of these techniques are classified as "good" and "bad" depending on their intentions and whether or not they meet the standards set by search engines.

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Good SEO techniques are classified as White Hat and bad as Black Hat.   The use of the term "Hat" has its origin in Western movies, in which the villains wear black hats and the heroes wear white hats.

Next, we will explain what these techniques consist of that, subject to an ethical duality, you must implement or avoid, as the case may be. Let's get started!

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO tactics are those actions that intend to deceive and persuade search engines to speed up the positioning process, since it usually takes time. For these reasons, they are considered unethical and are penalized.

Google, for example, has established quality guidelines that every developer, web designer, and copywriter must adhere to if they want a web page to rank. If you don't, you can be "punished" by having the site removed from your browser.

Those who perform Black Hat SEO practices are known as hackers. They are people who break search engine guidelines, implement manipulation tactics through code, and are focused on making a quick profit, no matter the implications.

Black Hat SEO practices

Concealment:

Also known as cloaking, it is the action of directing search engines to a different page than the one shown to users.

Spamming keywords:

It consists of unnecessarily repeating a keyword in the texts of a web page to position it.

Use of hidden texts

It is about adjusting the color to the letters of a text so that it is the same as the background of the page. So users will not be able to read it, but search engines will. With this technique, people repeated the keywords artificially and the user did not notice it.

Exchange/sale of links

It is a bad practice of link building within SEO off page that consists of asking other websites for money or something in exchange for linking to yours.

content plagiarism

Plagiarism is an action that is rejected in multiple contexts, not only within web writing. It is about sharing information that is exactly the same as what is present on another web page.

Spam in forums and blogs

It consists of commenting on forums and blogs with links from your website without being requested and without any context.

Participation in link farms

Known in English as link farms, they are websites that are created with the purpose of massively linking to other websites, with the aim of increasing their Page Rank.

What is White Hat SEO?

White Hat SEO is the implementation of positioning actions that are in accordance with the quality guidelines of search engines and, in essence, are the SEO recommendations that ALWAYS! you must go on.

As you already realized, being on the dark side of SEO has consequences. So, so that the positioning of your website is authentic and your web page is not penalized, you must follow the following practices:

White Hat SEO Practices

Quality content creation

In SEO, quality content is one that has original ideas and reflections, provides truthful information, cites references, adheres to a defined style, and is easy to understand.

Meta tag optimization

Meta tags are HTML codes that are present in the internal structure of a web page. They serve to tell search engines what information to index and what actions to take with respect to a web page.

Its optimization is important because if a person searches Google for a keyword related to something and that word is present within the meta tags, it is more likely that that page will appear above another.

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Focus efforts on ensuring a good user experience

A web page must stand out for its design and ease of use, that is, it must have an interface that is manageable and understandable by its users. This guarantees a good experience.

These aspects become important criteria from which search engines start, to classify web pages within their results: if the user experience of a visitor is good, he will stay browsing and click on the same site again. the next time you see it in the results.

Building quality internal links

Just as there are good and bad SEO practices, there are also link building practices. This means that anything to do with link building is not necessarily bad.

A website can have various pages intertwined with each other (inbound links), as long as the intention is to cite a reference or content that can continue to arouse the interest of the user. This practice also helps positioning; The same happens if other websites link to yours because of the quality of their content.

Duplicate and broken link check

There are platforms such as Google Search Console that allow you to check if there are broken or duplicate links within a website that affect SEO and that, before search engines, can be seen as deceptive practices.

Prevent and eliminate user-generated spam on your site

There are people who often comment on web articles with links to drive traffic to a website that have deceptive intentions behind it. We recommend that you remove such comments, as they can affect your reputation if there are any links from those links that are part of a farm.

Is there a Gray Hat?

Yes! Like everything in life, things are not black or white, but there are nuances.

The middle point of both techniques is The Gray Hat: they are actions that can be misleading and unethical, but that Google or another search engine has not identified as such (yet).

Although this makes them less risky than Black Hat SEO tactics, they do have potential consequences and should therefore also be avoided.

One of the most well-known practices of Gray Hat is to use synonyms and "turn" texts (spinning) so that they do not look exactly like plagiarism.

In short, the difference between both SEO tricks is that those of white hat (Black Hat) follow the guidelines of search engines and improve the user experience, while those of black hat (Black Hat) do not comply with them.