{"id":1784,"date":"2019-12-12T13:47:21","date_gmt":"2019-12-12T13:47:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/?p=1784"},"modified":"2021-05-19T13:11:14","modified_gmt":"2021-05-19T13:11:14","slug":"white-hat-gray-hat-black-hat-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/blog\/seo-basics\/white-hat-gray-hat-black-hat-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"White Hat, Gray Hat and Black Hat SEO: what are the differences?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">SEO is a vast matter. It includes many techniques, approaches, and even points of view about professional ethics.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For this reason, SEO professionals identify <strong>three main categories<\/strong> of optimization practices:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">White Hat SEO techniques;<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Gray Hat SEO techniques;<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Black Hat SEO techniques.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you work with SEO, you are already using techniques that fall into one of these three categories, whether you are aware of them or not. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In this article, we go into detail of the white hat, black hat, and grey hat SEO techniques and their features.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What is white hat SEO?<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Professionals use <strong>White hat SEO<\/strong> techniques when they comply with the guidelines provided by Google and other search engines and doing their work without cheating.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The White Hat SEO consultant plays by the rules and doesn&#8217;t try to get around them. She doesn&#8217;t exploit the flaws of the algorithm, nor she damages her competitors.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Doing white hat SEO is the best solution if you aim to <strong>long-term results<\/strong> and don&#8217;t want to see your work go wasted after a Google&#8217;s algorithm update, <strong>penalizations<\/strong>, or <strong>manual actions<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You&#8217;ll see results coming slowly, but steadily.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Examples of White Hat SEO techniques<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Keyword research;<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Optimization of the website user experience;<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Natural use of keywords in the tag title and headings, in the content, in the alt text, and the anchor;<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Constant quality content creation.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Black Hat SEO<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As you can imagine, while White Hat SEO is linked to an ethical, rules-abiding way of working, <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Black Hat SEO<\/strong> is quite the opposite.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With Black Hat SEO, we mean an approach to search engine optimization that aims to get the best results as soon as possible with any means necessary, including techniques for <strong>SERP and algorithms&#8217; manipulation<\/strong>, or even practices that are at the edge of the law, that slander or damage the competitors.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What are the consequences of such practices?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Compared to White SEO, Black Hat SEO techniques can boost your results in no time. But their effect is always temporary. Eventually, the search engine will get the better of you, thanks to its constant updating and searching for malpractices.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A Black Hat SEO strategy always ends up with a penalization and the disappearance of the website from search results.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Examples Black Hat SEO techniques<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Keyword stuffing (it&#8217;s obsolete, anyway);<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">PBN (private blog network) creation;<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Use of doorways;<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Cloaking;<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Duplicate contents<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Gray Hat SEO<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As well as in life, SEO it&#8217;s not necessarily a matter of black or white. There various shades of gray, and we&#8217;re not talking about anything kinky.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Grey Hat<\/strong> SEO techniques don&#8217;t break Google&#8217;s guidelines, but it does not mean that the search engine looks favorably upon them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They are strategies that the algorithm cannot notice and aim to improve the ranking of a website in a not-so-natural way.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Examples of Gray Hat SEO techniques<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Moderate link building practices;<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Edit the publication date of articles and make them appear as new;<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Republish preexistent content with just little modifications.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">White Hat or Black Hat?<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">SEO is a complicated matter, and a true professional must master many techniques.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But SEO is not all about techniques and strategies. A relevant part of the job deals with ethical matters.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>In the end, the choice is yours: will you be a diligent SEO or will you turn to the dark side?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this short article, we explain 3 different practices and approaches to SEO. And what about you? Which ones do you use?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[131],"tags":[],"acf":[],"lang":"en","translations":{"en":1784,"it":1765},"pll_sync_post":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1784"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4553,"href":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions\/4553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}