Which is better SEO? Black hat or White hat?
Search engine optimisation techniques can usually be placed in one of two broad categories. Search engines will scrutinise the activities of webmasters and how they improve a website’s position in search term rankings and to ensure they keep their practices ethical.
‘White hat’ practices are more ethical and due to their compliance with the guidelines of the search engines, tend to have longer lasting effects on their search results. ‘Black hat’ activities are usually picked up by the search engines which often cause websites to get banned from their results and people who use these techniques expect to have only short term results.
‘White hat’ SEO techniques have no intent of deceiving the search engine and are used to ensure that the content the engine indexes and ranks is the same content the user will view. The common attitude of white hat practices is to produce content for users, not engines rather than exploiting the algorithms and tricking the spiders.
An SEO technique that is considered ‘Black hat’ involves the deception of the search engine. One popular technique is to use hidden text filled with keywords that is located off screen or in the same colour as the background as to be invisible to humans. Some developers will provide a different web page depending on whether it is being requested by a human or a search engine, giving the search engines exactly what they are looking for, this is known as ‘cloaking’.
Search engines will penalize sites they find using black hat techniques either by reducing their ranking or removing them from the results altogether. These penalties can either be applied by the automated algorithms or manually. Some large companies have been hit by this, for example in 2006 BMW Germany was removed from Google results for deceptive practices, they quickly apologised, fixed the pages and were subsequently restored to Google’s listing.
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