What are the Main Differences Between White Hat SEO VS Black Hat SEO?
Are you wondering what is 'White Hat SEO' or 'Black Hat SEO'? These terms generally refer to practices used by SEO experts and webmasters to improve the organic search rankings of their websites.
This article will discuss the main differences between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. And are there any benefits to using one SEO strategy among the two? As a website owner, which of the two SEO strategies should you use? Come on, find out.
Most of the SEO experts and webmasters, who are all website or blog owners all want to see their website get top ranking results in the search results. Now, it is a difficult task to decide which strategy is appropriate for achieving this goal.
There are two different SEO strategies:
- White Hat SEO
- Black Hat SEO
Before I continue, let me clarify that SEO applies to getting and bringing visitors through organic search on search engines, unlike paid advertising or featured snippets. Let's examine each of the SEO strategies above and see which SEO strategy is right for you!
White-hat SEO
White hat SEO techniques are Google-friendly and 'approved' techniques that are constantly updated to comply with Google algorithmic updates.
With more frequent algorithm updates, the SEO strategy has been overhauled to synchronize the previously adopted SEO techniques.
White hat SEO involves the following approaches:
Quality content
The core element of a high-traffic website is original and quality content. Every high traffic website must have original and quality content. As a webmaster, you should always write content for your audience, and not for search engines. An information-rich content or website will result in a higher conversion rate and that will reduce the bounce rate.
Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are the backbone of a successful SEO strategy. Creating quality backlinks on relevant websites will bring 'authority' as well as traffic to your website.
Organized site structure
Keeping a clean and logical site structure makes it easy for Google search spiders to crawl your website and index content. Make sure your website hierarchy is well defined. Include a sitemap on your website to improve crawl by Googlebot.
Keyword-rich meta tags
Always write keyword-rich meta tags, so that search bots can easily understand the context of the page. Try adding the most relevant keywords you think your website audience might be searching for. Avoid keyword stuffing at all costs.
Page title and URL
You don't want to be seen as a SPAM website with long or ambiguous URLs and page titles. Therefore, create and maintain an organized URL structure that is easy to read by both humans and search engines. Creating a professional page title with a good URL will add value and accessibility to both searchers for bots and visitors.
Black-Hat SEO
Although Black-Hat SEO may seem like a 'crook' in digital marketing, but it's not illegal even if it's unethical. Excessive Black-Hat SEO techniques will eventually result in your website being penalized or de-indexed from Google in the sense that it won't be found in search results due to penalties.
Black-Hat SEO applies dirty tricks or techniques and doesn't 'comply' with Google's webmaster guidelines for SEO.
Here are some Black Hat SEO techniques you should know:
Duplicate or 'scraped' content
Using duplicate content throughout a website is one of the most used Black Hat SEO methods. Google also penalizes such websites and removes their index in search engines (sometimes without any notification).
Keyword Stuffing
Repeating keywords only to increase the keyword density of a particular page - This was one technique that was popular a few years ago. Some Black Hat SEO experts even use white or hidden text to hide repeated keywords, and sometimes actually hide the text with the help of CSS. WordPress users should use an SEO optimization plugin like Yoast SEO because Yoast can tell you how many keywords you can use in an article or page, and provide an indicator if it meets or exceeds it.
Negative Backlinks
Although this technique rarely works today, it is the most dangerous and forbidden SEO technique. These types of backlinks are usually obtained through purchasing SPAM links in thousands and redirecting them to competing websites which will eventually be penalized by Google.
Doorway Pages
This is a technique mostly used to present a completely different page to Googlebot when sending visitors to a particular page. These pages direct visitors who have come via organic search to irrelevant websites that visitors don't expect to see.
Personal Blog Network (PBN)
Before the Penguin update, this technique was widely used. This involves building a network of low-quality blogging networks together to form incoming connections to your site, thereby driving your site's ranking in searches. After the Penguin Update, quantity got replaced by quality and low-quality inbound links like that greatly affect your SEO.
The difference between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO is quite clear. You must pay attention to the following aspects while applying these techniques.
High Values vs Low Values
The goal of implementing Black Hat SEO techniques may be tempting to achieve high rankings in a short time, they tend to be of low value.
Whereas White hat tactics are of high value in the sense that they will ultimately pay off by increasing your ranking in the SERPs.
Black-hat tactics ignore returns on investment for short returns and are therefore riskier given the fact that Google's policies are more aggressive than ever.
Long term vs Short term
Implementing Black-hat techniques can provide great results in the short term as long as the website is not penalized by Google. High short-term returns also pose a high risk.
Therefore, if you have a serious business that aims for the long term, then don't take the risk of using Black Hat techniques as this could destroy your business in the near future, it's best to prefer to use White Hat which has long term advantages.
And those are some explanations of the main differences between Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO, I hope this article was of use to you, and let me know in the comments below what you think about this method. And share your experiences about using each of these SEO techniques?
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