What’s the difference between black hat SEO and white hat SEO?

Hi,

There is a huge difference between these two terms. Let’s see.

White hat SEO (sometimes called ethical SEO) relates to optimization techniques that aim to make content consistent with the Google policy and which make sites helpful for users. This kind of SEO won’t boost your website’s traffic in an hour, but it will bring profits in the long term.

White Hat SEO concerns among others:

• Making relevant content that provides useful information about a particular issue. Content that offers a solution to a problem.
• The use of relevant keywords.
• Including more than 2000 words in a post. If you write more, search engines will think that you offer more value for users and therefore, they will consider your content to be more important.
• Using proper titles and meta tags.
• Using quality inbound links. The more links your site gets from relevant and respected sites, the better.
• Easy navigation and fast site performance.

Black hat SEO strategies focus only on search engines. It means that you don’t optimize your content for people who read it. What’s more, the approach is called black because it breaks search engines rules. This strategy is usually used by people who look for a fast income rather than building a good site that will bring profits in the long term.

Black SEO tactics include such things as:

• Buying links for SEO.
• Cloaking – it happens when search engines bots are presented a different content than humans. For example, when you click on a link that has no correlation with the site and its content. Cloaking may destroy site’s long-term performance and can result in removing your site from the index.
• Publishing invisible texts. This technique includes writing a white text on a white site so that it’s invisible to visitors, but search engines can see it.
• Spamming – it happens when you place your links on sites and forums that aren’t related to your subject. Interestingly, there are online tools that can insert your links in different places for you.
• Duplicating content. It happens when one content appears in more places on the web. The thing is that Google doesn’t like duplicating because the engines don’t know which of these versions is the most important. As a result, the site that includes a duplicate content may lose traffic and get lower rankings.
• Article spinning – it’s a process of recycling content, so it seems to be new. It can be done using tools designed especially for this task. Google can easily detect such content.
• Link farms. The term refers to websites that include a load of hyperlinks that don’t relate to the site’s content. Such a network can be easily created by the use of specific software. However, it can also be quickly found by search engines. Again, it’s a road to nowhere.