Black Hat SEO v/s White Hat SEO

Be it a small firm or a large organisation, you would have been exposed to various effective ways and methods to achieve site optimization for your website. These ways and methods may actually work for you, but there is one distinction you need to clearly understand for consistent long term positive results. I.e. Black hat SEO and White Hat SEO.  Ever thought why in the olden days the Hero of a movie would be generally dressed in white and the villain in Black? The same logic applies here, both these SEO Techniques aim towards the same things, i.e. higher ROI on the website, higher site ranking, high website visibility,etc but they have remarkable distinguishing factors which you are probably unaware of. Let’s explore these 2 SEO techniques in details:

What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO is a deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It comprises of a set of illegal and unethical practices, in an attempt to improve search engine results for a website. This method of optimization maximizes short-term results by taking undue advantage of the loopholes in search engine algorithms. 

Some features of Black Hat SEO?

•It violates search engines guidelines
•It encourages manipulative tactics
•It aims at “Quick wins”

Common Black hat SEO techniques you must avoid:

Keyword Stuffing: Keywords are used to make your web page rank well. Some individuals and companies over crowd their pages with relevant keywords in an attempt to amplify keywords signals to search engines. Sadly this is said to make the website rank well for its keywords which will backfire in the long run.

Link Spamming: As we know that the internet is a network of multiple hyperlinks. SEO practitioners are known to insert multiple links to web pages, believing these links will attract positive signals to the search engines.

Deceptive Redirection: If a web page is broken, under maintenance or outdated the owners may redirect the user to a different page. If the Google crawler sees this redirect and indexes it, its a legal practice. If the Bot doesn’t see what is shown to a visitor it is a misleading or deceptive redirect.

Cloaking: Cloaking is when a website owner shows different content to the visitors and different content to the Google Bots.

Automating Content: This is when content on the web page is automatically generated using a software tool and publishing on the web page. 

Hidden Links or Text: This technique is when the webmaster stuff keywords and links in such a way that they make the text colour same as the background colour so that it is only visible to the google crawlers and not to the visitors.

Link Schemes: Google has shared a variety of link schemes that are listed in the webmasters guidelines. This explains the use of automated programs which encourages extensive link exchanges, where websites exchange links amongst each other generously.

Black hat SEO penalties:
Google can penalise individuals or a company for indulging in black Hat SEo techniques either manually or algorithmic. Most of these actions are taken without any warnings or notifications to the website owners. Some penalty actions are:

1. Your website could be banned by Google
2. Google will stop indexing your website.
3. Your website updates and alterations are deprioritized by Google.

What is White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO is typically aims to create and optimize content which targets people and not the search engine bots. The bonus here is that if people like what they see and read, it helps your web page to rank well.

Some proven White hat SEO tactics you can use:

Content optimization: Content optimization revolves around creating new as well as unique content to engage the target audience. Search engines reward websites with relevant, authoritative and quality content by increasing your page rank.

Technical SEO: Your sites meta-structure, tags, keyword relevancy, internal links alt text need to be designed and applied in such a way that the search engine bot can pick up your website for a relevant visitor search. It is proven that a website that puts genuine efforts in enhancing their technical merit by altering tags, content as per current search trends often experiences a boost in the search engines results pages.

Ethical Link Building: Search engines encourage link building in order to share useful and relevant content with other websites. Here Google focuses on sharing information in order to tell its users where you as an individual or company belong in the broader context of the internet. Unlike advertorial link building and keyword stuffing, in white hat SEO if google studies that these links send signals from authoritative external links you website ranking can drastically increase.

White hat SEO is the Search Engine Hero and after reading this article we all know what Black Hat SEO has in store for us in the long run. To avoid Google penalties which can affect business in a drastic way, one must adhere to the Webmaster SEO guidelines like we do at iDigitize.  We believe in delivering SEO Services to our clients using google’s authorised SEO techniques. 

Reference Links:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en