Difference between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO
White Hat SEO involves ethical practices like creating high-quality content, optimizing website structure, and using relevant keywords to improve SERP rankings through a trustworthy process, earning Google's trust. On the other hand, Black Hat SEO employs unethical strategies such as keyword stuffing and cloaking, leading to quick but penalized rankings.
Achieving higher positions in SERPs and increasing visibility is crucial for online success, and the choice between White Hat and Black Hat SEO determines the effectiveness of the approach, emphasizing ethical practices for long-term sustainability.
What is White Hat SEO?
White Hat SEO is rules that are ethical and approved by Google algorithms. It goes with the terms and conditions Google applies to rank a website at the top.
The name 'White Hat' came from old English movies where the protagonist or the hero used to wear white cowboy hats. On the contrary, the villains wear black hats to convey the negative role. In the SEO industry, white hat means good, ethical, and trustworthy strategies like everyone's favourite, and black hat means unethical, fake strategies to optimize a website.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO is a compilation of illicit practices used to get a higher ranking position in SERP by violating search engine companies' guidelines. It manipulates the algorithm to get a fast solution for high ranking. Sometimes, it might get the desired top position, but in the long term, it does not work at all. This black hat magic brings penalties like degrading the position or, in some cases, removing it from search results.
The black hat strategy fooled search engines and convinced them that the website was highly relevant to a certain search term and of higher quality than originally. Search engines are using so many resources to fight spam. So this plan won't succeed. These foolish strategies also lead to useless, irrelevant search results and bad experiences.
While the white hat strategy might go slow it has the trust of Google.
Despite the terms and conditions of not using a black hat SEO strategy, some companies still use it until they get caught.
White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO
Let's discuss the key differences between these two strategies.
1. Focus and Target Audience
- White Hat SEO prioritizes the human user, emphasizing user experience and satisfaction.
- Black Hat SEO targets search engines exclusively, providing no value to human users.
2. Impact on Website Credibility
- White Hat SEO enhances a website's credibility, user authority, and trustworthiness, earning approval from both users and search engines.
- Black Hat SEO degrades the user experience on SERPs, damaging a website's authority and trust.
3. Compliance with Guidelines
- White Hat SEO follows webmaster guidelines, involving thorough research, planned keyword placement, high-quality content, and natural link acquisition from authoritative sites.
- Black Hat SEO employs quick but deceptive methods like keyword and link spamming, attempting to manipulate search engine crawlers.
4. Search Engine Approval
- White Hat SEO is approved by search engines, aligning with their guidelines.
- Search engines do not approve of Black Hat techniques.
5. Long-term vs. Short-term Goals
- White Hat SEO is ideal for long-term plans, as it adheres to Google guidelines and withstands algorithm updates.
- Black Hat SEO is typically used for short-term goals, as it may achieve quick results but struggles to maintain position due to constant Google algorithm updates.
6. Manipulation vs. Organic Approach
- Black Hat manipulates search engines for rapid results.
- White Hat SEO takes an organic and ethical path to improve rankings.
7. Link Building Approach
- White Hat SEO uses relevant and natural links from high-quality websites.
- Black Hat seeks links from irrelevant and poor-quality websites.
8. Techniques
- White Hat techniques include keyword planning, quality content creation, on-page SEO improvements, and natural link building.
- Black Hat techniques involve keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text, plagiarized content, and link schemes.
Benefits of White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO is about optimizing your website to secure a high rank ethically. It aims to provide overall quality instead of giving only high rank. Some key benefits are:
Improved search engine visibility
White hat SEO is in Google's good book; it gives you a higher spot in SERP. The same can be done through black hat SEO, it wouldn't be permanent. White Hat strategy provides slow but consistent success in SERP.
Build trustworthiness
Trustworthiness is one of the essential pillars of SEO because it determines whether Google trusts your site or not. If Google does not trust your site, it won't appear as search results.
Following white hat SEO techniques will help to build the trust of search engines-
- Tell visitors who you are
- Make the purpose of your content clear
- Consider multiple viewpoints
- Link to high-quality sources
- Pay attention to your online reputation
- Update content regularly
- Work with experts to create content
Safe from Google penalties
White hat SEO works with rules and regulations suggested by Google. So, you can confidently run your site. Getting the desired result might be slower than a quick black hat magic but it will save your site from the penalty Google.
Impact of Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO brings unnecessary trouble to your site with an instant hike in position. These can be;
Google Penalty
Using Black Hat SEO leads to search engine penalties like losing SERP ranking or getting removed from search engine results.
Question of credibility
Adapting black hat tactics will compel you to acquire link spam, which results in irrelevant search results. Users would not trust your website and it indicates low trustworthiness.
Poor user experience
The black hat strategy often uses practices like irrelevant and keyword-stuffed content and duplicate content which can not satisfy user intent at all. This will decrease user experience and turn your site into a spam website.
White Hat SEO techniques
This strategy involves the following steps:
- Keyword Placement
- High-quality Content
- On-Page SEO
- Link Building
1. Keyword Placement
Keyword is the key ingredient of SEO. Right keyword research can change the entire game. But that does not mean more keywords make your content great. Choosing and placing it in the right position is the proper way to do it without forcefully putting it.
You can use keyword research tools and keywords in the website content. When a user searches these keywords, the search engine automatically shows your website in search results.
2. High-quality Content
Again, I will say the cliche- 'Content is the king'. Yes, how much you do the other things; if you don't have anything to inform, valuable to share, and enrich your users, your website will not rank.
The search engines are based on information. People use it to find information, knowledge, and other stuff. The main focus of search engines is providing relevant, correct information to users. So, ensuring that web content is useful and relevant is in their interest.
Now, if you don't have the relevant and useful content of your related industry, why would google rank it even if you put the right keywords? It will ruin the reputation of search engines and waste users' time.
High-quality content should be relevant to your niche, readable, simple, and provide a good experience.
3. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is another vital part of the white hat strategy. On-page SEO comprises the structure of the page and content. It provides the required information to search engines and helps them understand the webpage's quality.
On-page SEO components like title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, and internal linking are for humans and software.
4. Link Building
Link building is the promotion of your website on other websites. A newbie website does not have so many followers or users. So, you must share your content with other popular websites in an ethical way to attract users. Here, Google also defines the rules for link building.
Remember, while building links, choose the relevant websites in your industry. Let's say you have an SEO agency.
You should link your website to others with high domain ratings and SEO or digital marketing-related websites. The audience from those sites might come to your website. Now, if you link with pet related site, their traffic will not come to your site because they don't even know what the hell SEO is.
SEO and pet are completely different niches and are not related. So, build links in relevant and high authority websites to promote your business.
Usual Black Hat SEO Tactics
While we don't recommend employing these tactics, it's important to be aware of them to prevent mistakes. Here are five major strategies classified as 'Black Hat SEO.'
- Keyword Stuffing
- Cloaking
- Hidden Text
- Duplicate Content
- Paid Links
1. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is using too many targeted keywords repeatedly in variations to manipulate the search engine results page ranking. Though it increases the keyword density, it does not provide quality. The use of unnecessary, irrelevant keywords makes it difficult to read the content. The same long jargon will decrease the readability also.
Carefully observe the above image. That is a website copy of a shoe company. In this short paragraph, they have used the word "Shoe" 5 times! Too many shoes made the copy unattractive.
More keywords are not equal to more quality. Quality content combines useful, related, simple content that readers can easily understand.
2. Cloaking
Cloaking is an attempt to deceive search engine bots by showing them one URL, page, or content while displaying a different URL, webpage, and content to users. In the white hat strategy, pages and content remain consistent for both bots and users.
But in this case, it shows a page optimized for the user's search query and another for search engine bots to snatch the top ranks. Different types of cloaking are-
User-Agent Cloaking
- IP-based cloaking
- JavaScript cloaking
- HTTP_REFERER cloaking
- HTTP Accept-language header cloaking
3. Hidden Text
Black hat strategy users used to put hidden keywords that visitors could not see but search engines could. Don't think you can trick Google by using this technique. Using certain keywords in HTML code will not rank your site.
4. Duplicate Content
While reviewing a great article, you might think,' What if I copy and publish it on my website?'
That's called plagiarism. It's a big no! Search engines can catch these tricks in seconds and penalize your site.
Now you might be thinking, what if I change a few words and publish it? It might rank, but that article has zero value because the search engine already has high-quality content on the same topic. Changing a few words does not increase the value of the article.
5. Paid Links
Links are used to pass the link juice, i.e., organic traffic. Honest link-building can improve your site authority and rank as well. When money comes in between things have changed.
There are so many websites offering links in exchange for money. You don't know whether these links are secure or not. These sites send poor-quality links to their customers for huge amounts of money. They don't care about your site.
The worst paid link is spammy directories.
Google webmaster guidelines are strictly against these risky businesses.
Conclusion
In the SEO industry, choosing between white-hat SEO and Black Hat SEO is significant. Businesses can build a long-lasting online presence by going with White hat strategies with ethical practices.
But for this, you need patience. It is not an overnight job.
While Black Hat strategies might succeed in fooling the algorithms and bringing higher ranking, they won't stay long with you and bring their consequences.
