Learn the differences between White Hat and Black Hat SEO

In this article on White Hat and Black Hat SEO Defined we tell you what are the correct ways -the “White Hat” ways to optimize your website for the Search Engines (SEO) and what are the wrong ways, the “Black Hat” ways and we tell you how the Black Hat Methods can get your website in trouble! You can click on this link to read our article on How to get More Blog Traffic once you understand the difference between the  Black Hat and White Hat methods discussed in this article.

White Hat and Black Hat SEO Defined

Black Hat SEO Defined

Black Hat SEO is anything  you do to increase the ranking of your website in the Search Engines Results Pages (The SERPS) that is unnatural or deliberately misleading so that the search engines send you more free “organic” traffic.

So Whats the Problem with Black Hat SEO?

Search engines are used by people like you and me to find what we are looking for on the web. When you type in “Big Party Balloons” into the Google Search engine you probably want to find a supplier of Big Party Balloons. But if Google returned pornography websites you would probably switch and do the search on Yahoo or some other search engine right?

That is the problem. Black Hat SEO is an effort to fool the search engines into thinking that a website is the BEST site for a given set of keywords even though it may not be true!

When people do searches they don’t want to get back

1. The wrong types of websites,
2. Websites that don’t have the information they are looking for
3. Or articles that are “spun ” (Spun articles are articles that are copied from someone else and the :rewritten using a computer program to change the words and make the article appear unique. The problem with spun articles is they are hard to read and often make no sense at all as if they were written by someone who did not understand English)
4. or spam filled website
5. or worse yet websites filled with viruses

So the search engines try to do the best they can to give their users the information that they want.

Black Hat techniques are an effort to fool the search engines into giving preferences to the wrong or inferior websites!

Here are example of common Black Hat SEO practices:

• Paying for links to your website to make it seem like other sites really like your site
• Hiding keywords in white so they don’t show up to the reader but show up to the search engines
• Using redirects that make the search engine direct you to a n apparently legitimate site but then redirects the reader to a fake or spammy site or unrelated site
• Auto generated content that adds no value or the reprinting of other peoples content.
• Massive back linking – creating an abnormal amount of back links to your site to make it look like thousands or hundreds of thousands of sites think the content is great.
• etc.

What are the penalties for Black Hat SEO techniques?

• The search engines can delist your site!
• That means that your site will no longer be listed at all anywhere in the SERPS when people search on your key words!
• ZERO search engine traffic!
• Penalties can be lessor – like none of your results showing up on the first 5 pages (a -50) penalty) etc.

White Hat SEO Defined

White hat SEO is all about optimizing your website for the readers. It includes:

• Quality well written articles.
• Articles and websites that are focused on a specific area with unique content. You can click on this link to read our article on
• Web pages that are not overly cluttered with advertisements that make it hard to find the content
• Using On Page factors to guide the readers to the information that they need. this includes headers and sub headers, highlighted text of importance.
• Articles with Links to related information at other authority sites. For example you can click on this link to read more about white and black hat SEO at Wikopedia.
• Linking to your website:

1. from other blogs
2. or forums
3. or by sending out your articles to other sites with backlinks to your sites
4. or from press releases
5. or from web directories
6. or from meaningful related comments on other blogs

You can click on this link to read our Google SEO 101 article on the basics of SEO !

The benefits of White hat SEO are that the readers AND the search engines will love your website and more and more people will link to it naturally and stay to read it more and your traffic will grow naturally and organically.

You can click on this link to go to our main web page and read more articles like this White Hat and Black Hat SEO Defined article!

OK thats the end of this article!