In recent years, the terms white hat and black hat have been applied to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry. Black hat SEO tactics such as spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines' terms of service, whereas white hat methods are generally approved by the search engines. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.
A SEO tactic, technique or method is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to game the algorithm. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.
The White Hat
White hat marketing applies the White hat SEO techniques, also known as ethical SEO. The white hat marketing implies that all SEO activities are carried out while conforming to the guidelines, rules and policies of search engines. It is an ethical guideline since all site managers abide to the written, as well as unwritten rules and guidelines for SEO. Some of these guidelines are:
- Providing relevant keywords that cater for short and long tails results
- Updating the content regularly
- Analysing search results analytics reports and take corrective actions as required
- Providing links to other websites as well as requesting other networks to link to this website
The Black Hat
Black hat marketing involves SEO activities that are against the norms of search engines. Hence, black hat marketing is unethical. It is difficult for the search engine alone to distinguish when black hat SEO is applied. Competitors can play a role by reporting cases of black hat marketing to the search engines, who will in turn ban or penalise the website. Despite the risk of ban, marketers still can go for black hat marketing because it helps in boosting up the page location in search result. Example of Black hat marketing are:
- keyword stuffing - keywords can be provided, among others, in meta tags,alt tags, comment tags, as invisible text to human eyes. By overusing the same keywords throughout a web page, search engines algorithm, that reads keywords, will drive the web page up in its search result.
- doorway and cloaked pages - web site contain web pages that are listed in search result. However, when entering these pages, users are redirected to other pages. Hence, the search result contents do not match the page displayed to users.
- link farming
The Gray Hat
Gray hat marketing lies between white hat marketing and black hat marketing. Here, the site owner provides greater risks than white hat marketing, by disobeying to some of the search engine guidelines, but at the same time ensures limited disobediance so as not to fail into black hat marketing. For example, gray hat marketing may involve a keyword density higher than required but not too excessive.
Website involved in gray hat marketing may face penalty but may be safe from ban.
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