How have the Definitions of Black Hat and White Hat
SEO Changed?
Since the
time SEO grew in popularity, there has been a villain and a hero in the game; the
villain being “Black Hat SEO” and the hero being “White Hat SEO”. It won’t be
wrong to say that those times are long gone by when there were distinct and
obvious differences in SEO in the name of ethics.
Understanding the Difference between Blackhat and
Whitehat SEO
The fact
is people define and perceive these two characters of SEO in a different way
and most of them have different sorts of examples to explain each of them.
Today, it is important that we think and understand the tactical and strategic
differences between the two and not just accept White Hat SEO without knowing
how “White” it actually is.
Thinking
on differentSEO processes and their probable effects on your website is
crucial; after all, these SEO processes help in driving organic
traffic to your website and you can’t just leave out few of these processes just
because few people consider them to be Black Hat SEO.
In the following
sections, we will take a close and honest look at different practical options
we have, to boost our rankings without worrying too much about White Hat or
Black Hat and at the same time not venturing into illegitimate territories.
Assessing the Impact on Your Business
It’s most
important to assess what value is added to your websites and its rankings by
the tactics you use should define what steps you take. Spam is usually referred
to as one of the low value tactics, but a close look at it would tell you that
it is neither unethical nor illegal and is mostly done for so-called SEO
purposes that don’t really produce good results. Of course, it largely depends upon
your point of view. Let us take an example, where you link all the websites of
your clients to your website with the target keywords. This is not unethical
but it also doesn’t add any value because Google understands how painfully
simple this is, and tends to value only links coming from contextual, high
quality sources. People go for such tactics because they believe they would get
higher returns for lower investment of time. This, however, is rarely true!
Risk factor is something that you can’t afford to
overlook at any point of time!
Ask
yourself how much risk you can take and what would happen if one fine day
Google decides to throw your websites away? What would you do then? Answers to
these questions will only scare you if you have been consistently practicing
only SEO focused tactics that are normally Black Hat or Gray Hat or semi
innocent tactics. Call them whatever you want, but the risk factor associated
with such methods has dramatically gone up since the advent ofGoogle Penguin
update. Earlier, we used to hear websites getting de-indexed and then coming
back again in few weeks; but post Penguin update, such stories have literally
become fairy-tales. Even the ones who managed to come back requiredseveral
months or even up to a year, and to do so; they had to bear revenue losses for such
a long period.
So, if
there’s high risk associated with anything, then it’s worth trying out any Blackhat
SEO tactics.
Adopting Different Tactics for AchievingShort Term and
Long Term Goals
Planning
to promote a product, which will be off the market in next 10-12, will require
different set of efforts than planning to promote an established business that
is looking for long term results. The biggest problem is that even the big
businesses are in hurry to get instant results and they end up taking steps
that backfire, whereas there is never any hurry for such businesses to get
quick results.
They
should invest quality time and money in building a strong online reputation
over a period of good 1 or 2 years and the results after that, will be
positively overwhelming. So, patience is the key here, but when it comes to
promoting upcoming events and any of the upcoming launches, slight usage of
grey-hat SEO won’t do any harm, because you’re not looking at long-term
results.
Authorbio:
Anthony is an expert SEO and blogger who regularly contributes articles to SEOP, a reputable search engine optimization company providing effective and affordable SEO services."
















