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.
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.