In today’s digital landscape, terms like white hat SEO, black hat SEO and grey hat SEO are common yet confusing terms. These terms matter a lot when it comes to SERP ranking for your business website. The issue is that people are aware of their existence but are not exactly sure of how these terms differ.
Simply put, similar to the ways heroes, villains and neutral characters play their parts in movies; white, black and grey hat SEO play their parts in digital marketing. Whereas white hat SEO is considered good and ethical practice that follows authentic SEO guidelines, black hat SEO is malicious and grey hat SEO is neutral. Here we are going to discuss these terms in detail to explore the differences among them.
What is White hat SEO?
Before diving into the differences, let’s discuss the basics. White hat SEO follows all the rules given by search engines. It uses industry-approved strategies and ethical techniques to improve the ranking of business websites on the search engine results page. To know more about white hat SEO strategies and search engines’ guidelines, check out the SEO services offered by the expert digital marketing agency in Belgium, Digibo Global.
- Keyword research is crucial because your page will not rank if it does not contain relevant keywords that are based on customer intent.
- Writing high-quality content based on keywords so that the content can answer or resolve all kinds of user queries.
- Ethical on-page SEO practices by optimising key elements of the website as well as inside the HTML code is a mandatory white hat SEO practice. This enables the SEO experts to alert the search engines about which keywords the page needs to rank.
- Accurate internal linking increases a website’s topical authority, making it a popular white-hat SEO strategy.
- Organic backlinks improve your website’s reputation and in turn, improve your ranking. Search engines never ask for money or goods in exchange for organic backlinks. Based on keyword placements and the content quality of your website, backlinks can be earned.
- Mobile responsiveness is another factor in white hat SEO strategy since search engines prefer to rank pages that load faster and function properly across devices. So, while taking charge of white hat SEO, it is important to ensure that your website has optimum speed and mobile responsiveness.
What is Black hat SEO?
Black hat SEO refers to the act of violating the rules and regulations of search engine SEO guidelines to increase the ranking of a website in the SERPs. These are the bad guys that promise you false hope. In reality, they get your website banned from search engines through their malicious practices.
Black hat SEO tactics include:
- Hidden Text: this is one of the most used bad SEO techniques to cram keywords using CSS. It portrays the same coloured text as the background or zero font size to eliminate the issue of stuffed keywords. But these tactics often get caught by sophisticated search engines like Google.
- Keyword Stuffing: Constantly repeating target keywords multiple times is known as keyword stuffing and it is a bad SEO technique. Search engines do not allow this kind of manipulation and sometimes can penalise the website owners.
- Cloaking: It is a black hat SEO technique that masks or disguises the real content of a website for ranking purposes. Once a visitor clicks on the website, the website shows little or irrelevant content.
- Manipulative or paid links: Buying or selling links of any kind is strictly prohibited by the search engines like Google. Still, if any website encourages this type of practice, it will be marked as a black hat SEO tactic.
- Duplicate Content: When a website uses the same content to its multiple pages only changing the H1 title, it could be referred to as duplicate content. This tactic has become one of the most widespread black hat SEO tactics.
- Negative SEO: It is a malicious practice where a website decides to tarnish its competitor’s ranking on search engines in order to get a ranking of its own. Usually, this is done by stealing keywords from competitor websites.
What is Grey hat SEO?
Grey hat SEO refers to the combination of both white and black hat SEO practices. It is riskier compared to white hat SEO since it exploits search engines’ guidelines to a great extent. In grey hat SEO practice, black SEO gets masqueraded as white. Some of the most common grey hat SEO practices include using expired domains, purchasing or trading links and so on.
Grey hat SEO strategies include:
- Auto-generated content: This type of content gets created by rephrasing or scraping existing content using software. Although this type of content looks human-generated in the beginning, search engines can identify this type of content instantly and then penalise its creators.
- Using PBNs (Private Blog Networks): This is a grey hat SEO strategy where a separate website gets created to link to your website in order to manipulate search engine rankings.
Differences between White hat, Black hat and Grey hat SEO
White hat SEO | Black hat SEO | Grey hat SEO |
Ethical practice | Unethical practice | Unethical practice |
Follows search engine guidelines | Does not follow search engine guidelines | Does not follow search engine guidelines |
Contributes to improving ranking | Doesn’t contribute to ranking there is a risk of getting penalised for practising black hat SEO | Doesn’t contribute to ranking. In addition, there is a risk of getting penalised for practising grey hat SEO |
High-quality optimised content | Duplicate or scraped content | Duplicate or scraped content |
Sustainable in the long run | Temporarily provides ranking but ends up in penalty from the search engine | Temporarily provides ranking but ends up in penalty from the search engine |
In conclusion, whereas industry-approved strategies and ethical techniques are followed in white hat SEO practice, black hat and grey hat SEO practice depends a lot on violating those ethical techniques. Therefore, the safest way to improve your SERP ranking is to abide by the hero of the story, which is white-hat SEO. It might take time to get a ranking following these practices, but, it will be worth it for the long run in the future.
Are you ready to go up in the search engine ranking page by driving traffic to your website organically? To learn more about SEO best practices and strategies, follow Digibo Global.
