Black Hat Vs White Hat SEO

White Hat and Black Hat SEO are two different approaches by search engine optimizers on how to do search engine optimization. White hats are those which obey the guidelines by major search engines to optimize their site. Black hat techniques are simply referred as unethical practice by search engine optimizers. Search Engine Optimizers will pay for this when search engines noted that bad practice.

In this blog, I like to share some of the common elements which have both faces; they can be good or evil (black-hat), its in the hand of search engine optimizers.

1.Meta Tags:
Though meta-tags has low value in search engine ranking, they still important to let the users to know about your site via SERP snippet.

Black-hat techniques:

• Stuffing meta-tags with too many keywords.
• There might be repetition of the same keyword in the description.
• One good example for this., description of a Pet store website: ” Pets Shop India is the best pet store of all the pet stores. You’ve never seen a pet store like Pets Shop India. best pet stores, good pet stores, visit pet stores, contact pet stores”
• Stuffed meta-keyword from the same website: ” Pets Shop, pets, dogs and cats, pet stores, dogs, cats, lizards, birds, dog collars, hamster cages, jessica alba, fish, dog shampoo, dog treats, bird seed, good dogs, bad dogs, nice kitty”
• This technique aimed to get to high ranking in SERP but unfortunately Google says its no longer using meta-tags for ranking. But still many using this in order to attract visitors via snippet.

White-hat techniques:

• Always choose the right and relevant keyword for your web-page.
• Prefer to use user-friendly title, meta-keywords, meta-description.
• Stuffing the meta-tags with too-much keyword will make annoying to the visitors.
• A white hat meta-keywords could be: “online pet store, pets, pet supplies, pets store, pet supply store”
• A white hat meta-description could be: ” Pets Shop India is an online shop with a diverse range of dogs, cats, birds, fish and more. Our pet supply store can help you get everything you need for all of your pets.

2. Content:

Black-hat techniques:

• Hidden Content: Creating hidden text and showing only to search engines is a kind of unethical process. Hidden content includes white text full of keywords on a white background.
• Duplicating content: creating numerous copies of web pages in order to increase page rank.
• Page jacking: Copying and pasting content from other websites and showing the users as it your own content.

White-hat techniques:

• Content should be unique, afresh, relevant, quality, user-friendly.
• We have to use the keyword within proper keyword density (less than 5%)
• The keyword should be randomly spread in the content and should not cause keyword clouding there.

3. On-Page Techniques:

Black Hat Techniques:

• Hidden link: Showing links only to search engines.
• Hidden Image with ‘alt’: Very small sized image which user’s cant see that. It provided to increase the ranking for particular keyword by having ‘alt’ attribute for that.
• Link farming: Buying into link farms, sites with no other intention than to increase your links unnaturally.

Here is the screen shot for Hidden links

White Hat Techniques:

• Content should attract the users to give link to your website.
• Natural link building is always a healthy one for SEO (Link-baiting).
• Never try to fool search engines by using link-farming, hidden-links.

The black hat mentality isn’t just about getting good SERP ranking. It is about doing whatever you can to drive revenue via your website. That could mean getting temporary rankings in Google. If your site is found to have black hat SEO, it will be severely penalized by if not completely removed from SERP of major search engines. So, always there will be a risk of handling black hat techniques. Also cant get back the website once it is removed by search engine.

Hence, search engine optimization technique is considered white hat SEO if it conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and involves no deception. We can say the ethical & legal SEO as white hat SEO. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but also ensures that the content to be indexed by search engine and makes the site to get subsequent ranking. Usually, it ends up in the form of a lot of traffic and higher profits take anywhere from 3 months to a year. Eventhough it takes some time to accomplish, we can able to get the stable result through white hat techniques.

Disclaimer: The post is completely based on individual thoughts and SEO Services Group bears no responsibilities for the thoughts reflected in the post.