What is Black Hat and White Hat SEO?

Learn about the differences between black hat & white hat SEO techniques and how they can affect your website ranking on Google.

What is Black Hat and White Hat SEO?

White-hat SEO techniques are tactics that work within search engines' terms of service to improve the ranking of a site's search engine results page (SERP).

Black hat SEO

refers to attempts to improve rankings in ways that are not approved by search engines and involve deception. They go against current search engine guidelines. White hat SEO, on the other hand, refers to the use of best practice methods to achieve high search engine rankings.

It complies with search engine guidelines and focuses on content quality. White hat SEO consists of relevant internal and external links, while black hat SEO consists of irrelevant backlinks. Black Hat SEO webmasters exchange backlinks to increase their website ranking. To do SEO safely, it's good to understand Google's webmaster guidelines for complying with search engine optimization rules.

Not only does White Hat SEO follow all SEO guidelines, it ensures that all content indexed by search engines is the same as what a human user will see. As you delve deeper into the world of digital marketing and the best ways to optimize your site, black hat tactics versus black hat tactics may have the exact opposite result of what the SEOs who use them intend to do. The goal here is to help you understand how the black hat SEO and white hat SEO activities work to rank a website on Google and other search engines. If a tactic is designed to make Google think that a site offers more value to users than it actually offers, it's misleading and it's a black-hat SEO.

Techniques commonly used in white hat SEO include using keywords and keyword analysis, researching, rewriting meta tags to make them more relevant, link building, link building, and writing content for human readers. In this author's view, white hat SEO and carefully considered gray hat SEO are probably your safest route.