What Makes an SEO Tactic Black Hat or White Hat?

The terms “black hat” and “white hat” are thrown around every time a discussion about search engine optimization arises. Fundamentally, these two terms have been delegated to cover two basic types of techniques, black=bad and white=good. The problem is that many people who use these terms are not able to truly define what is good and what is bad.

In many conversations, black hat techniques are often referred to as unethical. This is often because scammers and spammers often utilize many of these techniques to try to defraud their “customers”. However, at the same time, many black hat techniques are also used by legitimate marketers, who are just looking to increase their organic traffic. The problem with arbitrarily labeling black hat techniques as unethical, is that there is no standard set of ethics regarding SEO practices.

In practice, black hat techniques are SEO strategies that are likely to get a website banned from the Google index or drastically reduce the websites SERP's. With this in mind, here are a few examples of SEO tactics that are considered to be black hat tactics.

Invisible Text

This may be worked in the earliest days of Google, however it is no longer helpful. This is when a webmaster uses white text on a white background and simple repeats a series of keywords. Granted, it doesn't directly affect the users experience because they cannot see white text on a white background, however it attempts to fool Google bots to increase the SERP based on the series of keywords used in the background. If your website uses this tactic, there is an extremely high probability that Google will punish your sites ranking.

Page Cloaking

Page Cloaking is when the same page displays two different results for users and the Google bot. The goal of this strategy was to give the Google bot a page designed to increase the SERP of the page based on what the Googlebot sees, while often offer no real value to user. Often this tactic is used with pages that are full of advertisements or links to other pages. Google hates this practice because it skews search results to include content that is not helpful to the user.

There are many, many more of these tactics. The one common aspect is the goal of every tactic is to increase the SERP's of the website.

White hat strategies are SEO strategies that are considered to be timeless. Google loves content and they always will. Therefore, creating useful and engaging content will allow your website to rank well far into the future. Naturally building incoming links is another example of a white hat strategy, although there are ways to do this that can also be considered as black hat by some.

When push comes to shove, there is one time-tested way to determine if a tactic is white hat or black hat. Does Google punish you for it. If you get de-indexed, then some tactic you used is considered black hat by Google.

To ensure that your techniques are white hat, simply follow the best practices that have been laid out by Google. In truth, almost every tactic when taken to an extreme can become black hat, and many black hat techniques are still being used successfully to trick Google. In truth, there are no absolutes when it comes to SEO techniques, every technique encompasses a shade of gray. The closer to black you get, the higher probability that Google will punish your website.

Think of using black hat techniques like trying to cheat in a Las Vegas casino. Casinos admit that some cheaters win every day, however the greedier they get, the more likely they are to be caught. Using black hat techniques are the same way. The more you use them, the more likely you are to get punished by Google.

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