White Hat vs Black Hat SEO

Let’s dig into White Hat vs Black Hat SEO and see why it’s important for you to have White Hat SEO strategies over Black hat SEO Strategies. Also, see exactly why you wouldn’t want to use any Black Hat SEO and see why it’s disadvantageous.

Examples of White Hat SEO in use

Let’s start with the good stuff first shall we? Its what needs to be concentrated on anyways:

1. Creating quality content designed to improve user knowledge and experience.

This would be original content that when someone lands on the page they’d find useful to whatever they were searching for. There are tools that monitor how long a person is on your page and what part of the page or post they get to before exiting.

2. Building a website that stands out from the competition for the right reason.

This one simply means better content and a better user experience than a competitor. Enhanced images with better descriptions and relevance. More content that is related than another competitor.

3. Relevant content.

For each search query, search engines (through indexing) check websites and decide which are the best to meet the searcher’s requirements. To do this, algorithms evaluate how well the websites in their index process match what the user is looking for exactly or as close as possible to their search.

There are all kinds of different characteristics that Google considers, like load time, technical specifications, link structure, and the content’s relevance. These algorithm processes are what generate the rankings in the search results.

Relevant texts are extremely important for ranking on Google’s search engine. This is because the search results are supposed to match users’ different search queries as exactly as possible. The ultimate aim is a satisfying user experience.

4. Follow Google’s guidelines.

This is pretty straightforward, and you can review these on their webmaster guidelines directly. 

5. Properly labeled & optimized images.

By doing SEO, you might already know all your images need a proper alt tag description. If you didn’t know, that’s the first priority. The second is image file size.

If you aren’t compressing your images, you are making your page load times much, much slower. And Google will hit you for that in your ranking.

6. Relevant links and references.

Inbound links, also known as “backlinks” or “external links”, are just hyperlinks that point from one website to another. They’re the currency of the Internet, as they act a lot like real-life reputations.

7. Complete sentences with correct spelling and grammar (this one is self-explanatory).

8. Relevant page titles:

This one makes the most sense, because if you did your research for your blog post or page, and you optimized it and geared the page to explain specific keywords for specific searches, you will be more likely to show up in search results over people who didn’t take those steps for a specific search query.

Examples of Black Hat SEO

I feel like I shouldn’t have to break these down because it should be common sense in most cases. But here we go:

1. Creating content designed to manipulate and deceive

Hidden text, with the ultimate goal of manipulating Google’s algorithm, will get you in trouble and penalized. But there are a few valid and Google-approved reasons to hide content, which you can hear from Google themselves here:

2. Duplicate content, such as copying other people’s work that’s already on Google

Duplicate content generally refers to content on your site that either completely matches other content in the same language or is even slightly similar. But if you copy someone else’s work, you will be at fault and won’t rank. This is because the original content will be given priority over the new imposter content.

3. Hiding text behind images, making it invisible, etc.

This one is pretty self-explanatory, Google’s crawling methods catch anything like this so you won’t be able to hide it for very long without it hurting your SEO performance.

4. Linking to sites that aren’t relevant to the blog/page

This one is key as well on the point of staying relevant. It applies to your content and your links. If your blog post or page just links out to random places, insecure sites, etc., Google might even think your page is deceptive and you won’t rank. If you need to link out your blog somewhere, just make sure it has relevance or is somehow connected to what your message on your page or blog post is about.

5. Redirecting to another page when you were meant to be what the user searched for

This is deception in its finest. If you clicked on some records and it redirects you (even if it’s a delayed redirect), this will look completely bad in Google’s eyes and get flagged and be made to rank poorly because of it.

6. “Farming” backlinks, buying them from third-party companies

When hearing about how backlinks help boost your SEO, you might be tempted to get into a third-party company to provide backlinks. While it might seem to help boost you in the beginning, Google is still seeing all these connections going to your site. It’s a two-way street. Meaning if a not-so-high-quality site is backlinking to your site, it’s going to degrade your site, even if it’s minute.  You’ll want to ensure you have a relevant company backlinking to your site, which will help you in the long run. This might require harder work because you have to get a connection with the needed company first and then establish some agreement to backlink to your site.

Providing you don’t take the black hat SEO steps, you can be on your way with white hat SEO and in the long run benefit from it so much more than if you try to do black hat SEO.

I hope you enjoyed this blog, please let me know in the comments below if you have any questions and if this helped you at all in your marketing efforts, thank you!