Tag: seo typology

Categories
Search Engine Optimization

Grey Hat SEO

What is Grey Hat SEO?

It is what its name suggests. It’s somewhere in the middle of white and black and if used by a professional, can still be effective. However, it’s safe to say that taking a grey hat approach is playing with fire if you’re not 100% sure of what you’re doing and since we’re predominantly content-led now, it’s not something I would recommend.

Grey hat consists of techniques such as:

  • Cloaking
  • Purchasing old domains
  • Duplicate content
  • Link buying
  • Social media automation and purchasing followers

Cloaking

Cloaking is a practice that shows the user a different result than it does the search engine. For Google, it’s considered to be a high-risk practice that is in violation of its rules. Personally, I would put cloaking in the black hat category and many would agree, but the jury’s still out in certain parts of the SEO community where it actually falls.

As you can see from the Matt Cutt’s video, cloaking is not something that he or Googlebots approve of. Cloaking can be achieved by altering meta information, so that it doesn’t reflect the content and tampering with the IP address of a site.

Doorway pages can also be considered a form of cloaking and are large sets of pages which are each optimised for a keyword or phrase in order to direct the user to one site. Again, they are designed to manipulate bots and trick users into visiting a site they didn’t intend to. These can also be multiple pages on the same site that have keywords such as locations, so that the site can take advantage of as many keywords as possible.

Old Domains

The web is a font of old domains that have been abandoned and those that the owners don’t use much and these are often used as a way to create backlinks in order to improve rankings. Generally, these tend to be authoritative domains so that the link appears to be of a good quality.

Duplicate Content

Content, content. It’s the kingpin of the internet and all SEO efforts. We mentioned text spinners before and whilst a small proportion of these can be effective, it’s still a very dodgy idea to use them.

Purchasing Links

One word of advice: don’t. If you get found out, you will get a penalty, it’s as simple as that and all of the investment you have put into your site will be worth zero. However, you can list your site on relevant industry directories as this is approved of.

There have been a lot of scare stories relating to guest posting and if this constitutes buying links, but if no cash is exchanged, then this is irrelevant. However, links can be exchanged for sponsorship of events (for example) and this is OK too.

Social Media Automation and Buying Followers

By social automation, I’m not talking about using tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule posts. These are legitimate tools that help to save time when you’re managing multiple accounts.

However, you can get other tools that auto-follow and unfollow 1000s of social media users without you lifting a finger for as little as a fiver for 5000. This is one of the few here that can be called strictly grey hat as it’s not made it to Google’s blacklist yet, possibly as social signals are only just becoming important to search engines.

Buying followers may seem like a great idea to make it look like you’re in with the in crowd, but all it actually means is no engagement and the risk of infecting any true followers with malware in some instances. There’s no positives to it and it’s easy to tell those that have, as they have a Twitter following filled with faceless profiles. Organically obtaining a following isn’t necessarily an overnight affair, but it’s worth it in the end.

What does all this mean?

Some SEO companies use grey hat tactics, but the best ones don’t. The short-term advantage, much like black hat (and many of these tactics overlap into black hat) don’t make for a long-term business. Whilst grey hat might gain you some traffic initially, it won’t last, especially if you get caught out.

In essence, with modern content marketing and SEO, white hat wins out. The web is highly competitive, we all know that and so in order to ‘beat the system’, the best way is to work with it and invest in the future of your site.

Like anything in life, taking shortcuts to get you where you want to be right now is often the path to failure. Great SEO, good content and a well-planned out business, that’s what will give your site the competitive edge in the end.

Categories
Search Engine Optimization

White Hat SEO

The term “white hat SEO” refers to SEO tactics that are in line with the terms and conditions of the major search engines, including Google.

White hat SEO is the opposite of Black Hat SEO. Generally, white hat SEO refers to any practice that improves your search rankings on a search engine results page (SERP) while maintaining the integrity of your website and staying within the search engines’ terms of service. These tactics stay within the bounds as defined by Google. Examples of white hat SEO include:

  • Offering quality content and services
  • Fast site loading times and mobile-friendliness
  • Using descriptive, keyword-rich meta tags
  • Making your site easy to navigate

Examples of black hat SEO, by contrast, include purchasing links or using deceptive cloaking techniques. Any tactics that are considered deceitful or harmful for consumers would qualify as black hat. Black hat tactics are extremely risky and, as Google’s algorithms evolve, less and less likely to work.

Why Are White Hat SEO Techniques Important?

Failure to engage only in White Hat SEO practices can get your site banned from Google and other search engines.

As the number one search engine, Google is visited by billions of people per day, and each visit presents the potential for your site to be discovered by a new user.

Google is an undeniably powerful source of traffic to your website, and being banned can result in a drastic drop in website traffic and even business. Consider all the work that goes into your website and then think about what it would be like to be banned from the internet’s most commonly used search engine. What’s worse, once you’re banned from Google, there is no guarantee that they will ever re-list you. A lifetime ban from Google would have tremendous consequences.

Why risk it? Check out a complete description of Google-approved SEO techniques at Webmaster Guidelines. Google’s Webmaster resources are the go-to place to learn Google white hat SEO practices.

Should You Implement White Hat SEO Methods?

Definitely! Implementing White Hat SEO practices is the best way to create an ethical, sustainably successful website and business.

Here are some of the steps you should follow to make sure your SEO methods are strictly white hat.

Offer Quality Content and Services

Create high-quality content that meets your visitors’ needs and helps solve their problems. Use SEO keyword research tools to discover the most relevant keywords that your site content should be optimized for.

Then focus on using those keywords in great content, such as how-to articles and videos, that match the intent of the keyword and your end user.

Use Descriptive, Keyword-Rich Meta Tags

Follow best practices when creating meta descriptions for each page on your website to help search engines and users discover your content.

Make Your Site Easy to Navigate

Be mindful when organizing your site’s Information Architecture. Sites that are easy for users to get around tend to perform better in organic search results too.

 

Categories
Search Engine Optimization

Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO refers to a set of practices that are used to increases a site or page’s rank in search engines through means that violate the search engines’ terms of service. The term “black hat” originated in Western movies to distinguish the “bad guys” from the “good guys,” who wore white hats (see white hat SEO). Recently, it’s used more commonly to describe computer hackers, virus creators, and those who perform unethical actions with computers.

Black Hat SEO is most commonly defined as a disapproved practice that nevertheless could increase a page’s ranking in a search engine result page (SERP). These practices are against the search engine’s terms of service and can result in the site being banned from the search engine and affiliate sites. A list of tactics and strategies employed by black hat SEO practitioners have been openly denounced on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines.

“Is the work that I’m doing adding value to the user or am I just doing this for search engines to see?” is a litmus test on whether an SEO tactic would go against a search engine’s webmaster guideline. If no value is added to the user, but rankings are likely to increase, then your decisions are highly likely to be black hat. The same test can be applied to to paid search practices to determine whether an activity is considered black hat ppc.

There are two reason why you may report black hat SEO. Either your website has been attacked through a malicious hack, virus or negative SEO campaign of spammy links, or you see spammy web results on a competitive keyword your website is ranking on. For the latter, you may file a webspam report through Google Webmaster Tools. Please use this tool with discretion. SPAM does not stand for search positions above mine! Falsely reporting web spam could be considered black hat SEO.

In the event that your website has been attacked through a malicious hack, virus, or malware, request for a malware review after you’ve removed the malicious code.

In the event that your website is the target of a negative SEO campaign of spammy links, use the Disavow Links Tool in Google Webmaster Tools after you’ve tried to contact webmasters whom are pointing these links to your website to have them removed.

Black Hat SEO tactics can get your website banned from Google and other search engines.

Though there may be some short-term success through increased traffic to your site, Google penalties are getting more and more sophisticated and can have devastating effects on your rankings and traffic. With hundreds of millions of users searching on Google per day, can you really afford to be de-indexed?