An Expert Guide to White Hat, Black Hat, and Grey Hat SEO Services in Canada
Chapter #7: White Hat, Black Hat, and Grey Hat SEO
SEO practitioners are divided into three categories namely White Hat SEO, Black Hat SEO, and Grey Hat SEO. SEO professionals who follow all the guidelines issued by the search engines while optimizing a website are known as White Hat SEO professionals and the process is known as White Hat SEO.
1. It follows search engine guidelines The most widely-accepted definition of white hat SEO is that it follows Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. ...
2. It focuses on a human audience White hat SEO involves making changes that are beneficial to a site’s visitors. ...
3. It takes a long-term approach
White hat SEO is a set of SEO strategies that improve your site’s rankings on a search engine results page without violating the rules of the search engine. White hat SEO follows the quality guidelines of search engines like Google and does not engage in spam methods to manipulate the algorithm.
In simpler words, the meaning of white hat SEO is that it’s a safe form of search engine optimization.
That’s the basic definition for what is white hat SEO. Next, we’ll go over a quick example of white hat optimization, then get into the benefits it has to offer before outlining a good white hat SEO strategy you can follow.
SEO professionals who try to manipulate the search engine ranking algorithm by practicing strategies that are banned by the search engines are known as Black Hat SEO professionals and the process is known as Black Hat SEO. Black Hat SEO is most commonly defined as a disapproved practice that nevertheless could increase a page's ranking in a search engine result page (SERP). These practices are against the search engine's terms of service and can result in the site being banned from the search engine and affiliate sites. A list of tactics and strategies employed by black hat SEO practitioners have been openly denounced on Google's Webmaster Guidelines and Bing's Webmaster Guidelines.
"Is the work that I'm doing adding value to the user or am I just doing this for search engines to see?" is a litmus test on whether an SEO tactic would go against a search engine's webmaster guideline. If no value is added to the user, but rankings are likely to increase, then your decisions are highly likely to be black hat. The same test can be applied to to paid search practices to determine whether an activity is considered black hat ppc.
SEO professionals who follow a mix of both White Hat and Black Hat SEO strategies while optimizing a website are known as Grey Hat SEO professionals and the process is known as Grey Hat SEO.
Most of the SEO professionals who practice SEO fall under the Grey Hat SEO category.
Gray Hat SEO is difficult to define. In the words of SEO Consultant John Andrews, Gray Hat SEO is not something between Black Hat and White Hat, but rather "the practice of tactics/techniques which remain ill-defined by published material coming out of Google, and for which reasonable people could disagree on how the tactics support or contrast with the spirit of Google’s published guidelines."
Gray Hat SEO is an SEO practice that's riskier than White Hat SEO, but one that may or may not result in your site being banned from search engines and heir affiliate sites. Generally, Gray Hat SEO practices belong in neither the Black Hat nor White Hat category because the terms of service regarding the issue are unclear.
