White Hat vs. Black Hat - High Risk and Low Risk Tactics
White Hat and Black Hat Tactics
Posted by Adam Hayes
At a recent SMX Conference, Matt Cutts (head of Google Web Spam) gave great examples of Black Hat and White Hat tactics as either high risk or low risk. Here are some blackhat/whitehat tactics and their relative risk factors:
| Topic | High Risk "Black Hat Tactics" | Low Risk "White Hat Tactics" |
| Cloaking | Showing different content to different users based on user-agent(i.e. Googlebot) | Showing the same content to all users |
| Doorway Pages | Little or no useful content pages meant to rank well for a specific keyword set and then funnel traffic to a specific page | Useful/Unique/Benefitial content meant to rank well for a specific keyword set. |
| Link Bait | Creating stories that are blatantly false merely to bait people into linking to your site | Creating unique, beneficial, and interesting stories that allow web masters an editorial choice (informed choice) to link to the content. |
| Widget Bait | Creating a widget that has
|
|
| Search Results in Search Results | Compiles a list of links where the person has to click again before they get to the real content they were looking for | Provides content that is what the user was looking for |
Trust and credibility is a limited commodity on the Internet and is much easier to lose than gain. Higher risk items can quickly lose your credibility and cause your site to be banned from the search engines. With more and more SEOs working inhouse on their own company website, higher risk tactics are just not an option.
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Filed Under: White Hat, Black Hat, Tactics, SEO
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"White Hat vs. Black Hat - High Risk and Low Risk Tactics"
Comments
2
Ryan
Trust and credibility is a limited commodity on the Internet and is much easier to lose than gain.
Nice quote man.
People who have longterm business goals, always prefer White Hat Tactics, but people who just want to make money and go away( and normally they come back with another idea) use Black Hat Tactics.
3
custom web design
Useful chart for internet marketing people and nice comparison of White Hat vs. Black Hat
4
Mike
Trust and credibility is a limited commodity on the Internet and is much easier to lose than gain.
Nice quote man. People who have long term business goals, always prefer White Hat Tactics, but people who just want to make money and go away( and normally they come back with another idea) use Black Hat Tactics.
5
meenakshi
excellent written about white v/s black hat
6
Purnendu
hi,
excellent information you guys provide. tell
more deeply Why Google not consider Black Hat SEO techniques.
7
Bert
How does a search engine know if the content is beneficial for the user?
"Useful/Unique/Benefitial content meant to rank well for a specific keyword set."
8
Succeed Online
@Bert.
That is a great question. One that the search engines are constantly trying to improve. Many "garbage" black hat sites will just string together random words with the keyword interspersed at strategic points.
Although this content is of no use to "common users" it can start to rank well for the keywords. Once it does, the black hat site will redirect the "juice" from that page to a page made to capitalize on the ranking.
However, Google and Bing are getting even better at identifying content that "looks" and "sounds" like real content based on similar words and words that are commonly found together.
9
Newton sarker
Really a nice content! I think this will help those who want to get the knowledge about white hat and black hat SEO.
10
Samuel Symes
Most link building by most SEO firms is not "natural" and is in fact blackhat according to Google. If you have to pay for it, ask for it, comment for it or insert a link in your article to gain it, then you are manipulating Google search results and Google terms that as blackhat. You just need to view the many video´s by Matt Cutts to realize that if you are doing any of the above, then you are creating links manually and you violating Google´s TOS.
It simply baffles me how many SEO experts will quickly denounce Cloaking as "unethical" or against Google´s TOS or even label it as spam which manipulates search results but then on a daily basis create artificial, manual or software generated backlinks for clients.
If you are distributing countless articles with links or posting on blogs/forums to obtain backlinks or using automated backlinking software, isn´t that also spamming to manipulate search engine results?
What is the difference? It all violates Google´s TOS.
So does "blackhat" or being "unethical" really exist anymore? Isn´t this really about traffic, conversions and surviving within an ever tightening monopoly created by Google for which we now are left with few other options, unless to line the pockets of Google shareholders.
1
Carrie Website Maintenance Gal
there was a roundtable at this years SES in San Jose with Bruce Clay, Dave Naylor, and others talking about black hat tactics vs. white hat tactics.
Very interesting, if you can find the blog transcript of it floating around the web it´s worth a read. Matt cutts got up at one point to talk about companies being penalized.