SEO Ethics: Which Hat To Wear - Which hat do you wear?
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Search engine optimization practitioners are divided into roughly three camps. There are the “white hats,” their polar opposite “black hats,” and the more loosely defined “grey hats” who use a mixture of ideas, some of which fall under the umbrella of both main camps.
What is referred to as white hat SEO really means using generally accepted optimization techniques and scrupulously avoiding even a hint of practices that are listed as problems in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. For the white hat SEO professional, and I am proud to confess to being one of them, any hint of a lack of ethics is to be avoided at all costs.
White hat SEO involves standard best practices, which include adding more theme relevant content pages, updating regularly, adding incoming links that properly use keywords in the link anchor text, and keeping the title tags up to date. Along with those standard procedures are the addition of a blogging component, working toward hub site and authority site status, and placing a strong emphasis on writing sound on page copy, with well placed keywords.
Black hat SEO usually means employing ranking techniques that are clearly outside of Google’s stated Webmaster Guidelines, and even outside of the published guidelines for the other major search engines. Methods used to achieve higher search rankings include cloaking, hidden text, link farms, and intensively cross linked sites.
Grey hat SEO falls somewhere in the middle. While that simple label doesn’t fully explain grey hat SEO, the concept is much more difficult to define. The techniques employed by a grey hat SEO are occasionally white hat, and just as often less oriented toward best practices. The use of some linking tools and content generating software have often been placed in this category.
Regardless of how the various SEO hats are defined, there will always be disagreements as to where the boundaries are drawn, and if there are even borders at all. The definitions are not intended to be firm and final. Instead, they are merely used so that we understand the general terms for purposes of a discussion of SEO ethics.
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