What is the Difference Between White Hat and Black Hat SEO?

What is Google Search Essentials?

Google is overflowing with valuable information regarding white hat and black hat SEO techniques. The best places to find this information includes:

• Search Essentials
• SEO Guide
• Spam Policies

Is Black Hat SEO Worth It?

Some digital marketers use black hat SEO techniques as a short term solution. It is possible for websites to evade detection and improve rankings using black hat SEO techniques. It does not give you a good ranking, meaning it follows the best practices and Google endorses the content that you publish. The problem is, that the search engine will identify the black hat techniques eventually. This may not be today or next week, but once they do catch you, you can find yourself facing a manual or algorithmic penalty, reducing your ranking significantly, making it more difficult to climb up the ranks again.

White Hat SEO Build Great Websites

White hat SEO techniques help you create a great website experience for your users, boosting user experience (UX), providing great content, and having high quality back links from high quality and relevant domains. When you use white hat SEO techniques you seldom experience any penalties. Using white hat SEO you achieve a sustained, long term improvement to your ranking, boosting your brand visibility.

Common Black Hat Techniques

Black hat techniques are attempts to trick search engines into believing a website is more relevant than it is. The most common black hat SEO techniques include:

• Keyword stuffing  - a form of spam that involves the overuse of keywords to manipulate the search engine into improving your ranking
• Hidden content – tags are used to hide content on the page that is invisible to users, but remains visible to the search engine 
• Paid links – links pointing to your site to boost ranking. Back links are excellent ways to boost your ranking, but they should never be paid for.
• Thin, low quality content

Common White Hat Techniques

White hat SEO techniques means following the guidelines of the search engines, ensuring you meet the Best Practices guidelines. Common white hat SEO techniques include:

• Creating high quality, unique, relevant, and informative content that provides value for the reader following the EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust) principle. 
• Conducting thorough keyword research
• Creating a good web design that is functional, easy to navigate, and fast loading
• Limiting the use of artificial intelligence (AI)
• Build back links naturally by creating unique content that other websites want to share

Conclusion

White hat SEO techniques are those that follow best practices as outlined in Googles policy documents and guidelines. Black hat SEO techniques, on the other hand, search for loopholes in search engine algorithms, manipulating the search engines to secure a better ranking.