Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is tremendously important for any website to grow and get traffic. Whether it’s a simple blog, or a website owned by a business for generating leads, without SEO, there is not a chance that it’s going to get many views, if any.
Under the context of SEO, many approaches exist that promise to deliver results. Two such approaches are white hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. While both of these techniques are aimed at increasing traffic, bettering website performance, and so on, white hat SEO prioritizes ethical strategies and adherence to search engine guidelines. On the other hand, Black Hat SEO encourages the use of manipulative practices to fool the search engines which may result in long-term SEO damage to the website and may even incur penalties from search engines.
In this blog, we will cover the essential differences between these two SEO approaches, and figure out how choosing any one of them may affect your online presence both in the long run and in the short run.
Table of Contents
What is White Hat SEO?
White Hat SEO is an SEO technique that prioritizes long term growth and sustainability. It includes practices that are both ethical and sustainable. It advocates following the guidelines and ethical standards set by the search engines and the community at large. It also focuses on the user’s experience and ensures that it is positive.
White Hat SEO Techniques and Best Practices
As we have already covered, white hat SEO is a positive and sustainable method of growing a website. To understand this notion better, we’ll have to take a look at the techniques and best practices that are employed under this approach of optimizing a website for search engines.
- High-Quality Content- White Hat SEO preaches creating high-quality original content that is full of value for the readers. Original content that is informative, engaging, and thought-provoking can prove to be one of the biggest assets in SEO. White Hat SEO also advises to keep the content focused on only the industry you’re operating in.
- Ethical Link Building- White hat SEO advises to build links only from high-quality reputable sources, and by using genuine outreach and content marketing. Staying away from content mills and link farms is greatly prioritized under white hat SEO. Internal linking of relevant additional resources is also promoted to improve user experience.
- Technical Optimization- White Hat SEO promotes intuitive and engaging UX (User Experience) design. The website’s font should be clear and readable, whereas the navigation should be simple. The website should also be optimized for mobile viewership and the loading times should be fast, enabled by using browser caching and using image optimizations.
- Keyword Research and Integration- Under white hat SEO, researching keywords for your industry and naturally integrating them into your content to create valuable content pieces is given a lot of focus. This is the primary way in which white hat SEO encourages content discovery. There should be no keyword stuffing and the content should be easy for the readers to read and understand.
Advantages of Using White Hat SEO
White hat SEO comes with a lot of advantages. Some of the key ones are:
- Compliance: White hat SEO ensures compliance with any guidelines set forth by the search engines. This helps website owners be in the clear of any penalties and restrictions being imposed upon them.
- Trust and Authority: Long term usage of white hat SEO ensures that you develop trust and authority in the search engine’s eyes. Avoiding shady practices makes the trust engines trust you and promote your content without any hassle.
- Better ROI: White hat SEO has better long term return on investment as once you go through the trouble of using white seo techniques, their effects are long lasting and sustainable.
- Long-Term Growth: Under white hat SEO, the quality of leads and traffic is much better. This ensures that you enjoy stable rankings in the search engines.
Disadvantages of White Hat SEO
Understandably, other SEO approaches have evolved because of the dissatisfaction from white hat SEO.
- Slow Results: Producing results with white hat SEO is a slow process. It takes a lot of time and effort to see the fruits of your labor, which might be frustrating and not suited to fast-changing industries.
- Resource Intensive: Because of the constant updation of content, ethical link building processes, and thorough keyword research required in white hat SEO, it is a very resource and time intensive process. A whole SEO team is required for it.
- Little to No Short Term Gains: White hat focuses on long term results and sustainability. Unfortunately, this means that short term goals or growth is ignored or rendered impossible.
- Competitive Disadvantage: In competitive industries, one cannot wait for many months to see results, because aggressive competitors may far surpass you by that point.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO encourages using algorithmic loopholes to exploit search engines and gain high rankings quickly. It prioritizes short-term results and ignores guidelines set forth by the search engines. The black hat methodology is not concerned about the ethical implications of work, and neither about the experience of users. It is very result-oriented in the terms of traffic, leads, backlinks, etc.
Black Hat SEO Techniques and Best Practices
As mentioned previously, Black Hat SEO promotes the usage of manipulative practices to fool search engines and end users. Some of these practices are:
- Clickbait: This is the process of using hyper-emotional or eye-catching headlines to attract clicks and users, but leading to content that does not actually match the headline. ‘Baiting’ through the use of false titles and premises is unethical and may lead to penalties.
- Link Farming: Using low quality links, farming links, buying links, or otherwise artificially creating links for your website to improve backlink profile is also a prominent black hat SEO practice.
- Cloaking: Cloaking refers to showing different pages to the search engine and user. It is a highly manipulative practice that may result in severe penalties.
- Content Scraping: Content scraping refers to using other websites’ content without their permission to create your own content. In simple words, copying content and passing it as your own.
- Hidden Text and Links: Making text transparent and stuffing keywords into it to manipulate search engines is another black hat SEO classic.
Advantages of using Black Hat SEO
Although manipulative, Black Hat SEO seems to provide good results in the short run. Some of its advantages are:
- Quick Results: Black Hat SEO provides quicker results in the short run than white hat SEO. This is because its foundations are based on manipulating search engines.
- Lower Costs: Because of the shady practices such as keyword stuffing, stealing content, click baiting, etc. there is not a lot of effort involved in black hat SEO, unlike white hat SEO that is resource and effort intensive.
- Competitive Edge: Black hat SEO can give website owners the temporary boost that they need to overcome competition. Because of its shady manipulative practices, it can be implemented fairly quickly.
Disadvantages of Black Hat SEO
Understandably, quick results and manipulation comes with large disadvantages. Some of the disadvantages of using black hat SEO are:
- Penalties by Search Engines: Search engines like Google are constantly looking out for black hat practices. Detection may lead to severe penalties such as exclusion from search results or severe drops in traffic.
- Loss of Trust: Engaging in manipulative practices and techniques can lead to a loss of trust in your website and, by extension, your business. Search engines may continue to suppress your presence even after abandoning black hat SEO practices.
- Poor User Experience: Black hat SEO practices create a poor user experience, leading to high bounce rates and low engagement. This creates negative publicity as well.
- Loss of Organic Growth: Once search engines detect black hat practices and impose a penalty, organic growth is severely stunted. Recovering growth rates after penalties is a time-consuming process.
- Legal Issues: Practices such as content scraping breach copyright laws, which might lead to legal issues.
Key Differences Between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO
Now that a foundational understanding has been built, let’s distinguish between white hat SEO and black hat SEO.
- Ethics and Compliance: While white hat SEO encourages ethical behavior and adherence to guidelines, black hat SEO ignores both ethics and compliance in favor of quick results. This makes white hat SEO safer in the long run albeit producing slower results, and makes black hat SEO a ticking time bomb for penalties.
- Risks: White hat SEO practices build trust and credibility in the search engine’s eyes. On the other hand, black hat SEO practices are deceptive and aimed at fooling search engines. This incurs a lot of risk, as if detected, search engines can impose severe penalties that stunt growth.
- User Experience: White hat SEO encourages providing a positive user experience and creating positive relationships with end users and consumers. This involves optimizing the website for navigation, readability, loading speeds, and keeping pop-ups to a minimum. On the other hand, Black hat SEO practices are least concerned with user experience. It advocates the use of spam popups, clickbaits, etc. to earn clicks and boost short term growth.
- Sustainability: White Hat SEO is based on the premise of sustainability and long term growth. It advises taking the long and hard path to achieve stable high rankings. Contrary to this focus on sustainability, Black hat SEO advises prioritizing short term results and completely ignores long term risks or long term growth.
Is Black Hat SEO Illegal?
While Black Hat SEO isn’t exactly illegal, it may involve certain practices such as content scraping that may attract legal claims. What it definitely does invite is penalties by search engines. While not being legal troubles, some penalties can hard organic growth to the extent where complete recovery takes years.
The main reason for which black hat SEO is generally looked down upon is that it completely ignores giving a valuable experience to the end user. It makes short term analytics the focus of SEO, whereas it is meant to enable a website owner to promote high-quality content over a larger audience.
While black hat SEO may prove short term results, it exposes the website to far greater risks. What website owners need to fear isn’t legal action, but the fact that websites can essentially die because of using black hat SEO practices by incurring search engine penalties and losing the trust of search engines.
How Many Types of SEO Are There?
Broadly speaking, there are a total of 4 categories from a point of view of their nature, namely blue hat SEO, gray hat SEO, white hat SEO, and finally black hat SEO, the last two of which we have already covered above.
Brief explanations of the other two are:
- Blue Hat SEO: Blue hat SEO refers to new and experimental SEO techniques being used by fresh creative geniuses in the field of SEO. It is a flexible and forward-thinking approach that isn’t strictly white or black hat.
It is used extensively in personal branding. For example: People often share clickbaity titles on their LinkedIn personal brand, but pitch in successful explanations after that, making them sort of black hat, but not really. This is the kind of experimental nature that blue hat SEO incorporates.
- Gray Hat SEO: Gray hat SEO is SEO that isn’t white hat, but isn’t exactly black hat also. It plays along the fine lines of what is almost not acceptable, yet it is. It focuses on utilizing the loopholes in search engine guidelines to promote the growth of a website. It is more risky than white hat SEO, but still much safer than direct black hat SEO.
From the point of view of functional areas, there are 3 categories of SEO:
- On-Page SEO: On-Page SEO is the optimization of individual pages via improving their content, keyword distributions, HTML meta tags, etc. How well you’ve written your content and how much it’s worth in quality are major factors in On-Page SEO.
- Off-Page SEO: Off-Page SEO refers to optimizing the external signals that affect your websites trustworthiness and credibility. It mainly involves building backlinks, using social media to boost your website’s presence, etc.
- Technical SEO: This aspect focuses on improving the technical performance of the website by optimizing loading speed, crawlability, mobile-friendliness, overall site structure, etc.
Conclusion
We can clearly see why using black hat SEO is frowned upon from a growth standpoint. Websites are supposed to be long term endeavors that bring in visitors constantly and grow overtime. Using black hat techniques defeats this purpose as the risk of penalties is far too great. The best advice for businesses and website owners would be to learn white hat SEO techniques properly and have patience while executing them, leading to long term growth.
At Mohit’s SEO Training, we provide an exhaustive hands-on SEO course to make you job-ready. Rather than focusing on the theory, we ensure teaching you the practical applications of SEO. Along with the Advanced SEO Training in Bangalore, we are an Organic SEO Consulting Company as well. If you are looking for a full proof SEO Strategy for your business, do contact us.
FAQS
What is the difference between black hat SEO and GREY hat SEO?
Black hat SEO uses unethical and manipulative practices to boost short term performance, whereas gray hat SEO utilizes the loopholes in guidelines to boost performance without directly committing to manipulative practices to fool the search engines.
What is the difference between white hat and black hat backlinks?
White hat backlinks are the organic backlinks that are earned due to your content being worthy enough for others to point to, and Google considers them a sign of endorsement. On the other hand, black hat backlinks are backlinks that have been farmed, purchased, or unnaturally exchanged.
What are four types of SEO?
Four types of SEO are white hat SEO, black hat SEO, gray hat SEO, and blue hat SEO.
What are the benefits of black hat SEO?
Black hat SEO boosts short term performance and brings in traffic in a relatively short time. Also, it does not need a lot of resources as input and is fairly easy to do.
What is white hat SEO in simple words?
White hat SEO refers to search engine optimization techniques that are ethical and sustainable, and that stick to the guidelines provided by search engines. It focuses on natural and long term growth and also on improving the user experience for website visitors
