Whenever we talk about SEO, we come across terms like white hat SEO and black hat SEO. Knowing about these terms and their strategies is crucial if you do not want to backfire on your search engine optimisation efforts. I have been working in the industry for many years and witnessed many business sites rise and fall because of their SEO practices.
Here in this blog, I am going to discuss what is white hat SEO and black Hat SEO, their comparison, and much more. So, if you are in the SEO profession, a digital marketer, or a business owner seeking optimisation services, you should be aware of all these details to safeguard the site’ ranking and reputation.
So, let’s delve into the details:
Knowing White Hat SEO:
White Hat SEO means optimising practices to boost search engine rankings while strictly following search engine guidelines mentioned by search engines like Google and Bing. White HAT SEO practices focus on providing high-quality, informative, authentic, and relevant content to create positive user experience.
With my experience, I focus more on content as it can drive us to the success of business online. With good content creation practices, we can double the traffic in six months. Remember the phrase “content is king,” as it is the cornerstone of white hat SEO practices.
Apart from Content, the White hat SEO practices rely on various factors like website speed and its mobile friendliness. Combining all these efforts brings a positive user experience, and naturally, the search engine algorithm ensures a sustainable high ranking. White hat SEO extends beyond content. It includes a variety of factors including, but not limited to
Exploring Black Hat SEO:
Black Hat SEO refers to tactics and techniques used by people to dodge search engine algorithms, and it often sabotages the necessary element required to rank high, i.e., user experience. These practices are quite helpful to achieve the site ranking target, but it’s all short term.
A black hat practice means you are on the red radar of search engine algorithms and can face penalties and severe manual actions.
There are many narrations of people who become witnesses of black hat SEO practices. One of my acquaintances once told me that they, too, service an SEO agency that claims to rank their site in a couple of weeks.
The site initially ranked high, but it was not long before the search engine caught it, and boom, the website disappeared overnight. To learn more about Google penalties and manual action, read our blog.
Black hat SEO practices often end in actions like manual actions that temporarily lower page rank or ban and exclusion from SERPs in case of severe black hat practices.
Comparison Between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO:
Let’s dig deeper into white and black-hat SEO with a detailed comparison to understand their methods, aims, and results.
Ethical Practices:
White Hat SEO: It is all about providing the best user experience and authentic information. The practices focus a lot on ethical considerations to provide valuable content.
Black Hat SEO: Black hat SEO is quite the opposite of the white hat SEO aims and objectives. It usually targets to exploit loopholes and ranks higher quickly, completely disregarding ethical standards and user experience.
Practices and Procedures:
White Hat SEO: It strives to include content with high quality, focus on optimising web speed, and increases mobile responsiveness. The strategy is focused on ranking on appropriate keywords and getting quality backlinks.
Black Hat SEO: The practices involve stuffing of keyword cloaking content features (showing content differently to users and search engines), content automation, etc.
Black Hat SEO practices involve keyword stuffing, cloaking (showing different content to search engines than to users), using private link networks, and content automation, among others.
Rankings and SEO Practices Impact:
White Hat SEO: White HAT SEO means long-term goals. It aims for long-term and sustainable growth in SERPs by offering the best user experience.
Black Hat SEO: It focuses on offering short-term results. You will witness the rankings improve quickly, and soon, it will disappear from the screen, followed by penalties and manual actions.
Risks and results:
White Hat SEO: White Hat SEO means striving to dominate search engine ranking by following Google’s guidelines. The only challenge SEO experts face is time and evolving algorithms. An expert SEO will make sure the site stays compliant with the latest trends and changes. Gradually, you will witness the positive results.
Black Hat SEO: It carries lots of risks and causes a loss of position in the digital world. Once caught by search engine algorithms, the website can face severe penalties like demotion from ranking or being completely removed from the face of SERPs.
Dos and Not to Dos of SEO:
So that’s about a detailed comparison between the two. Here is a list of black hat strategies one must avoid at any cost and white hat SEO strategies that must be followed for positive results. Let’s have a look:
Black Hat Tactics to avoid:
- Spam Comments
- Keyword Stuffing
- Cloaking
- Content Scrapping
- Sneaky Redirects
- Spammy link building
- Malicious Site behaviour
White Hat SEO tactics one must apply
- Focus on high-quality content
- Authentic link building
- In-depth keyword research
- Focus on user experience
- Optimise content
- Focus on technical SEO aspects
- Link to authoritative and relevant sites
Conclusion:
Knowing about White Hat SEO and black hat SEO tactics is important as one can lead to sustainable success while the other can make the site disappear from SERPs. White Hat SEO tactics aim to rank high sustainability while focusing on user-friendliness, best user experience, and mobile responsiveness.
On the contrary, black hat SEO focuses on ranking higher by finding and targeting loopholes in search engine algorithms. Meanwhile, ignoring user-friendly features at all. White Hat SEO ensures slow yet sustainable positive results. On the contrary, you might enjoy short-term higher rankings by following black hat SEO tactics, yet it can disappear immediately when caught and penalised severely by search engine algorithms.