Black Hat SEO vs White Hat SEO

Sooner or later, you are going to hear about black hat SEO and white hat SEO. In this article, we take a look at black hat seo vs. white hat SEO to clarify things for you.

Nirvana SEO

The powers that be at Google go to sleep every night with ideas of a perfect search engine. Their dream consists of a world where the only time a site links to another one is when the person doing the linking has thoroughly read the site and wants to give it a vote of credibility. There would be no such thing as SEO and certain no SEO professionals. It would all be natural and women would run around half-naked with butterflies fluttering around their head.

The ugly truth is Google will never realize this dream. It is impossible. In the real world, people will do everything they can to get their site to the top of the rankings for their specific keyword. How they go about doing this is where we get the black hat and white hat divide.

White Hat

White hat SEO refers to those manipulations of your search engine rankings that Google finds acceptable. These are laid out in something called the Google Webmaster Guidelines. The basic idea is you should try to do everything “ethically” online, whatever that happens to mean in this context. For example, you would forgo buying links from other sites . You would also avoid playing funny with the code of your site in an effort to trick Google into ranking you high.

The advantage of white hat SEO is that once you get high rankings, they tend to stay there forever. The disadvantage is it can take forever to get to that point.

Black Hat

“Luke, come to the dark side.” Black hat SEO is considered the dark side of search engine optimization. It is basically designed for people who are to impatient to wait months or years for rankings and who certainly are comfortable with a risk-to-ranking ratio that is tilted a bit more towards risks.

I should be clear that black hat SEO doesn’t refer to hacking or doing things that are illegal per se, although I am sure there are people out there that take it way too far. No, in the sense I am discussing it, black hat refers to more or less ignoring the Google webmaster guidelines and doing what you need to generate rankings as quickly as possible. This might include things like buying links on popular sites and blogs.

The advantage of black hat SEO is you get rankings a lot faster than with the white hat approach. The downside is you could then lose your rankings out of the blue at some point if Google figures out what you are doing and hammers you. In some cases, your site could even be banned. This simply means we are talking about high risk, high reward results.

Example

JC Penny is obviously a rather large company in the brick and mortar real world. Despite their size, their online results were disappointing and their site had poor rankings. Then they found an SEO company called SearchDex. Nobody is sure how it went down exactly and who knew what, but JC Penny eventually shot up the rankings for nearly every one of their products. Competitors that couldn’t beat them started to complain and suddenly you had the New York Times doing an investigation. Ultimately it was shown that SearchDex has been buying links from sites. The information from Google seemed to suggest that it knew as much for over a year, but it reacted to the bad press by penalizing the site down in the rankings. This only really happened in my opinion because the issue became so public.

So, did JC Penny pay a huge price? Not really, they were able to have top rankings for two straight Christmas shopping seasons and probably made a fortune. Yes, they are damaged now, but they’ve promised to get rid of the offending links and will then probably bounce right back up in the rankings. Perhaps even before Christmas in 2012 when they can buy links on other sites!

Which Is Better?

The truth of the matter is all efforts to artificially push one’s site up in the rankings is technically black hat. If you go out and intentionally contact the sites in the top 10 for your keyword to see if they will trade links, you are artificially tweaking your rankings. Still, most people would consider this a white hat move, so there you are.

The best solution for your site comes down to your comfort level with risk. It is as simple as that. Black hat SEO will get you to the top of the rankings much faster than white hat SEO. Once there, however, black hat SEO can get you dropped in the rankings from penalties or banned completely. If it September and you desperately need to get into the top rankings for the Christmas online shopping season, black hat is your only hope. If you just want to get your site up in the rankings and stay there permanently, then white hat is the choice.

The black hat SEO versus white hat SEO debate is much like the debate on abortion. Everyone has an opinion and they are not apt to change it regardless of what the other side says. Contact me today to learn more or find out more about an SEO campaign for your site.

Rick Warder

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