White Hat vs Black Hat SEO Techniques

By Paul Smithson, on October 25th, 2009

Taking the High Road, For Long Term Success.

Whitehat SEO basically means using methods to improve your search engine rankings that are consistent with what the search engines want webmasters to do.

It uses only “ethical” or “natural” methods, and doesn’t rely on the use of techniques that search engines widely disapprove of.

Blackhat SEO uses more ‘extreme’ methods of gaining search engine rankings such as doorway pages, cloaking, spamming, link farms, blog farms, and other subversive tactics.

Blackhat SEO is typically thought of as being used primarily for in-and-out profits. In other words, webmasters who use blackhat techniques expect to get banned at some point.

They know it’s going to happen, but they don’t care.

The point of using blackhat tactics is to grab a cheap domain, exploit the system to the maximum extent, and extract the greatest amount of money possible before the domain is discovered and banned.

When the domain is banned, the entire process is usually repeated on another domain, probably using a different IP address for the server.

Although most blackhat techniques aren’t illegal, they might get you into legal trouble if a search engine decides you’re enough of a problem to warrant legal action. Although this is incredibly unlikely for small-scale blackhatters, it’s enough of a possibility for larger webmasters that it should be taken into consideration.

Whitehat SEO is considered more “ethical” than blackhat SEO. Whitehat SEO is usually favored by people who wish to build long-term businesses, as opposed to seeking quick profits.

It is generally used by people who are building large or high-quality sites, and who want those sites to stick around and make money for a very long time.

By using methods that won’t get the domain banned, the webmaster builds a business that can make money over the long term and not just a few weeks or months. Although the money may come in much slower than it might for a blackhat webmaster, the overall amount of money made could end up being much larger.

There’s also an area somewhere in between these two ‘worlds’, called greyhat.

The word greyhat actually refers to a type of computer hacker, but that isn’t what the word means here. A greyhat webmaster typically builds whitehat websites, but uses a few “questionable” tactics to help raise their rankings.

Greyhat webmasters don’t typically use the extreme blackhat tactics like cloaking, but may use tactics like buying backlinks or spamming blog comments. They tend to do things that might get them banned, but where the chances of that happening would be unlikely.

It’s all a matter of risk versus reward. The bottom line is, only take risks with what you’re prepared to lose. If you aren’t prepared to risk losing the work you’ve put into a site, then you shouldn’t take the risks associated with blackhat SEO.

About Paul Smithson - Paul Smithson is the founder of Intellimon and the driving force behind the best-selling XSitePro web site development tool.

Since graduating in Business Strategy and Direct Marketing from two of Europe’s leading business schools, Paul has set up five multi-million dollar companies, one of which is now owned by the BBC. His areas of expertise include business strategy, e-commerce, on-line and off-line marketing, software development, and maximizing the potential of on-line businesses.

For more information about this, and many other Internet Marketing-related topics, visit Paul Smithson’s site, www.xsitepro.com.