SEO Ethics: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO
Our entire life revolves around ethics. Any one with a solid work ethic is always be the winner, some might argue that but it is what is it. I have talked a lot about SEO through my Blogging Ideas blog. To refresh your memory, search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. In general SEO techniques are classified into two broad categories:
- White Hat SEO: web promotion techniques following search engine guidelines
- Black Hat SEO: web promotion techniques not following any guidelines
First I will share my knowledge about the history for the term White Hat SEO or Black Hat SEO, and then I will get into details about them.
The terms, “White Hat” and “Black Hat” were actually talked form old school cowboy aka western movies, where good guys always wore “white hat” and bad guys wore “Black hat”. In western history, White is symbol of goodness and purity and black always has been depicted as dark, and evil. In the cyber crime, (yes, breaking the rules in a crime) the term “Black Hat” was first used for hacking. The bad hackers are called “Black Hat” who always exploited the holes in the system and “white hat” hackers always notified the authority even though they have/had the opportunity to exploits the security loop holes. And then it gradually came into the SEO department keeping “hacking” the SEO rules in mind.
White Hat SEO
White hat implies that the company uses best practice methods to achieve high search engine rankings. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White Hat SEO requires time to research, analyze and subsequently re-write meta tags, content and may offer a slight redesign of the website and page names. As a result White hat SEO tends to produce results that last a long time and are steady and ongoing.
Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, and/or involve deception. Black Hat methods tend to achieve rankings quickly, but the results are not long lasting. Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. Once caught, both companies quickly apologized and fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list. Black hats anticipate that their sites will eventually be banned once the search engines discover what they are doing.
Lets be realistic, there’s a lot of competition to be ranked high, and sometimes you the high competition may push your to think about utilizing those not so honest SEO technology choices. After all, if you cannot get ranked, you will not get traffic and all of your time and energy will be wasted. But you need to realize that while White Hat SEO may not work as quickly as you expected but following the rules and using White Hat SEO will get your site further in the long run. There is no place for short cuts in life thus DO NOT use Black Hat SEO. Think right, think smart and be a BloNgineer.
Filed Under: Blogging • Search Engine Optimization • WordPress
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