Digital Marketing

Black Hat SEO vs White Hat SEO | Benefits, Tips and Tricks of SEO

Last updated at 19-11-2021

Basics of Black Hat and White Hat SEO Techniques:

To improve a website’s search engine ranking, the two most widespread techniques used by specialists are termed as Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO.

Well, there are always two ways of doing a certain task, one that is easy but violates the rule book and the other that is difficult and time-taking but offers sustainable results without breaking any rules. We can distinguish Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO on the same scale. The black hat SEO refers to techniques and strategies that give your website higher search rankings until Google casts them out. Whereas, white hat SEO refers to those techniques and strategies that use the correct, ethical way to optimize a site that Google approves of.

Know Black Hat SEO and its techniques:

Black Hat SEO is an unethical SEO techniques used to get higher search rankings. It includes strategies that focus on exploiting loopholes in Google’s algorithm and increasing one's website traffic that is usually short-lived. Unlike white hat SEO, black hat SEO uses PBNs (Private Blog Networks) for generating backlinks that have nothing to do with improving user experience but improving rankings. To prevent users from these manipulative tactics and provide them with the best results to their searchers, Google constantly improves its algorithms that make black hat strategists lose their ranking.

So, if you’re using tactics like 

• Content Automation, 
• Keyword Stuffing, 
• Cloaking, 
• Sneaky redirects, 
• Hidden text or links, 
• Doorway Pages, 
• Creating malicious behaviour pages, 
• Scraped content and more 

for improving your websites’ ranking then you’re using black hat SEO techniques.

What is White Hat SEO and How to do it right?

White Hat SEO is like a long-term investment done by strategists to their websites. It leaves a long-lasting impact because the strategies used in White Hat SEO focuses on improving a site’s search engine results page (SERP) rankings while maintaining search engines’ terms of service. White Hat SEO strategy is to improve the site’s visitors experience by putting beneficial content for them over the website. Doing so, you get steady rankings for your target keywords and positive user experience but it takes a long time and intensive hard work to see the results.

On the contrary with Black Hat SEO, White Hat SEO involves investing in content but it does give you long-term results and is 100% ethical. Using white hat SEO strategies like, 

• keyword analysis, 
• Offering quality content, 
• Rewriting keyword-rich meta tags, 
• Quick site loading time, 
• Mobile-friendliness and more 

doesn't put your websites’ rank at any risk of demoting. 

So, the deal is don’t attempt to deceive Google’s algorithm or create manipulative rankings but use these algorithms as guidelines while making your websites user friendly and valuable content-rich to earn top place over Google search engine.

Major Difference between Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO

Even when the goal to both the SEO approaches is the same they are different in ways to achieve the targeted results. Now, coming to the criteria that distinguish Black Hat SEO from White Hat SEO and a few are mentioned in the below image.

Source: Neil Patel

1. Unlike Black Hat SEO, i.e. Unethical, White Hat SEO follows Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to optimize site’s visibility and user experience.

2. The pages created approaching Black Hat SEO are primarily to deceive users and create black hat backlinks via PBNs whereas, white hat backlinks are created by honest testimonials, guest blogging, and mutual partnerships to gain backlinks.

3. Following white hat strategies makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging but following black hat techniques like keyword stuffing give visitors a hard time reading your content. 

4. The black hat SEO strategists put spam keywords into the on-page content to fool search engine crawlers for improved ranking but the SEO experts using white hat give well-researched content, craft titles, Meta tags according to webpage, industry, and relevance to the website.

5. SEO Strategists use white hat SEO rather than a black hat because they offer long term goals and benefits.

 

Results of Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO Techniques

As you know, the Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO strategies are a bit different, although the results are similar. But the experts will suggest you stick with white hat SEO rather than creating black hat links as it prevents your website from demoting during an algorithm update and manual penalties.

Using ethical SEO strategies does require a significant amount of time, effort, and often money but you achieve significant results.

Source: Neil Patel

Here you can see, Black hat SEO, as well as White Hat SEO, does offer you results but the curves offered by black hat isn't that enduring.

So, SEO Experts benefit in the improvement of their website ranking by using Black Hat SEO techniques like PBNs and other link schemes along with being determined to play by the rules.

 

Best SEO Tips and tricks to rank without breaking the rules

Yes, there are black hat SEO techniques that are considered unethical when it comes to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. But these techniques are simply a good strategy gone wrong.

You can bring a significant result when starting working with white hat SEO and black hat SEO but in the proper moderation. So, you being a white hat SEO strategist could use a few black hat tricks to rank your website without breaking any rules.

1. Pitch other publications, write testimonials, include your name on third-party directories, create viral or share-worthy content. Doing so, you can create organic links for your website rather than looking like the PBN.

2. Instead of keyword stuffing, go for keyword sprinkling, i.e. including the right keyword to your website.

3. Keep blogging on your website consistently.

4. Practice inter-linking, i.e. try including two to three relevant internal links within each piece of unique content.

5. Change your brand name to something more ideal for SEO. It truly helps your ranking.

6. Use tiered linking strategy to increase the authority of the reference website and have strong backlinks.

So, these are a few tricks and tips turning black hat SEO strategy to White Hat. You can make black hat SEO strategies effective for your website by making them rely on similar white hat tactics. When you do it right, you will win in the long run without losing your integrity.