Difference Between White Hat And Black Hat SEO
There are two ways you can use to improve your website for search engines, the ethical and the unethical way. An ethical way is using white hat SEO where you optimize a site based on the search engine’s guideline, while the unethical way is by using black hat SEO, exploiting the search engine’s function to push your site to the top of the result pages.
What is White hat SEO
In general, white hat SEO technique adheres to the guideline set by Google. This includes content quality, in which the website needs to provide value to the users. You can check your website by asking yourself, is the content original? Is the content helpful to users? A white hat SEO technique focuses on improving the users experience while they are using your website.
The downside of white hat SEO technique is it takes a long term effort and a lot of research for it to show intended results. The upsides though, the effect would stay longer and it would be highly beneficial for your brand credibility. Sticking with white hat SEO technique is one way for your website to stay relevant and trustworthy for a long time, ensuring your business longevity.
White Hat SEO Technique
White Hat SEO technique involves using an ethical approach to optimizing your site based on search engine algorithms. It focuses on creating a website that is informative, user-friendly and provides users with a pleasant experience. This involves using methods like
On-page SEO : Optimizing aspects such as content, format and images that are directly available on your website.
Off-Page SEO : Optimizing aspects that are off your website, such as Google My Business and backlinks.
Technical SEO : Optimizes your website’s technical aspects such as the mobile friendliness and loading speed.
Local SEO : Optimizes your website for a specific locality, especially if your business provides service to a specific area or has a physical store, like a restaurant.
Mobile SEO : Optimizes your website specifically for searches and access on mobile devices, and also for search engines that use mobile site crawlers.
This method is used to cater to Google search algorithms and provide users with the best experience. You can find out more about the types of SEO by reading our article here.
By using this technique, you will be able to increase your website visibility in a way that adheres to Google’s guideline, avoiding the risk of getting your site penalized or delisted.
What is Blackhat SEO?
Black hat SEO, on the other hand, revolves around finding faults and exploiting the way search engine crawler works. A website that achieved high ranking through black hat SEO techniques might give out bad user experience and content. This is because the ranking is achieved not through proper optimization aimed toward providing users the best content ( refer to Google SEO Starter Guide ).
Black Hat SEO Technique
There are a lot of techniques used in blackhat SEO. Some of them are:
Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing involves cramming the site or particular page with keywords, like in the image example above using SEO SERVICES keyword.
In the early days of SEO, this method could help your website earn a higher ranking because Google’s algorithm treated pages with more repetitions of a keyword as more relevant. However, this method is now considered spammy and caused negative user experience. Unnatural and forced usage of keywords can discourage users from reading your content and interacting with your site.
Google’s latest algorithm prioritizes higher quality content, so cramming as many keywords as possible into your website would not lead to a better ranking. In fact, keyword stuffing now violates Google’s spam policies and might lead your site to being penalized or removed completely from the search result pages.
Doorway pages
Doorway pages are low quality web pages used solely to rank high in search results for specific keywords. They’re designed to be appealing to search engine crawlers, appearing as a high quality site which matches with their ranking factors.
The method involves filling the site with relevant keywords, but lacks valuable content for users. Instead, doorway pages will redirect the visitors to a completely different page or site, which affect the user’s experience.
Cloaking
Website cloaking is a method where a website shows a different version of itself depending on who’s accessing the site, either a real user or a search engine crawler.
This method involves showing search engine crawlers content packed with keywords and other related ranking factors, while real users see another version of the site which might be completely different. This deceptive tactic is used to trick search engines into ranking the site higher than they’re supposed to. However, search engines now are wise enough to detect cloaking and can penalize websites that use this method.
Invisible Content
Invisible content is where the website owner hides some chosen content from the users, but it was set to be visible to the search engine crawler. Some widely known method is to hide text into the website footer.
This text hiding technique is achieved through multiple way such as:
- Setting the font colour to be the exact same as the background colour
- Setting the font size to 0
- Using CSS to hide the text
Article Spinning
Article spinning is where the main website publishes an article, and after using AI software to ‘spin’ the content, publish it on multiple websites leading back to the main website in order to create backlink that appear to be high quality.
Spinning the content in this term refers to the act of rewriting some of the content from the original article using another word with similar meaning. This is different from paraphrasing as it does not use original wording and phrases from a human, instead relying on AI to completely change the wording. This would lead to a hard and awkward reading experience, with out of place usage of wording and sentence structure.
Conclusion
Black Hat SEO technique might seem like a tempting way to achieve higher ranking in a shorter time and effort, but the risks far outweigh the rewards. With search engines getting better at detecting and penalizing deceptive SEO methods, getting your site penalized and delisted is a sure-fire way to cause a destructive impact to your business and branding.
The best way to protect your online identity of your business and branding is to focus instead on white hat SEO, building a strong and sustainable online presence. This can be achieved by creating proper, high quality content and optimizing your website for real users. By following this method, your business will be able to prosper safely with credibility.
Intrigued about improving your online branding? You can find out more about improving your online branding through SEO and SEM covered by one of our articles here.