SEO Ethics: 3 Black Hat Tricks vs White Hat Methods for SEO

SEO ethics are sometimes disregarded in favor of “Black Hat” tricks for their perceived lower website ranking time when “White Hat” methods are far superior in the long run.

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In old Western movies, the “good guy” would ride around in a white hat, taking care of all the bad guys, who were typically clad in black hats. Just think about the Lone Ranger, for example. In the world of SEO (search engine optimization), competition is fierce, as positioning on the front pages of search results is key to your website’s performance. Before you begin promoting your site, it is important to look at some of the characteristics of white hat and black hat search engine optimization methods.

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Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO has to do with ethically unsound practices of website construction to boost the number of views that a website gets. Three of these tricks include keyword stuffing, using invisible text, and doorway pages.

1. Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing just means sticking keyword after keyword into your website page, with little regard for making sense with your text. Your users will hate it, because your website will be nonsense, and after a limited amount of time, the search engines will catch up with you and penalize your site.

2.  Invisible Text

Invisible text involves putting text on a background in the same color. As a user, you can’t see it, but the hope is that the search engine spiders will see it and boost the rankings of the page. Eventually the search engines will discover the hidden text and penalize your site as a result.

3.  Doorway Pages

Finally, doorway pages are phony pages that users never even see. They are put in place to try and trick search engine crawlers to point users toward your page.

While black hat SEO focuses on tricking the search engines, white hat SEO focuses on the users.

White Hat SEO

White hat search engine optimization also includes the use of keywords, but incorporates keywords seamlessly into the actual content text, using keyword analysis to figure out which keywords bring in the most user traffic. This set of techniques also includes link building in order to drive popularity, the use of back-links to increase page views, and focusing on high quality content that will interest human readers — not just search engine spiders.

End users, over time, prefer the white hat method. After all, no one wants to pull up an illegible website in the middle of a detailed search. Also, invisible text and doorway pages don’t even offer the user anything of benefit. The white hat techniques of back-linking and link building help the user navigate more easily. This is because while the site’s navigation follows the website designer’s wishes, it is still up to the users to decide what to do.

Profitability

As far as the actual profitability of the site is concerned, that really depends on the focus of the website. If you want don’t want to offer very much in terms of content, or if you don’t have a viable product or service, then black hat trickery can bring in cash without anything in the way of overhead. You just have to be willing to go in and frequently change your website so that the search engines do not catch up with you.  Of course, SEO ethics are not an issue for a crook like you!  🙂

But if you have a viable product or service and intend to set up one website for the long haul in order to build your brand, then using white hat methods of search engine optimization will bring in more profits over time. SEO ethics are critically important for a lasting online presence.

Black hat tricks are tempting — it’s easy, cheap, and fast to do. But  white hat SEO methods perform better over time and they have the added benefit of keeping your good name clean.