Whitehat vs. Blackhat

What do you mean I am way off? Or were you talking to the Paul?

Whitehat, Greyhat and Blackhat generally refer to the ethics of your marketing. Blackhat methods are generally deceitful in some way and the person filling out the offer is often doing so because they were tricked or promised something they will not receive. Greyhat methods generally violate the spirit of the offer that the advertiser has set up.

Blackhatworld.com is all about black hat; I read it to get creative ideas, some I would not do for a variety of reasons, ethics being one, and also getting banned from your aff. network.

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Whitehat = A legitimate, fair, play by the rules approach.

Blackhat = Using methods which detriment another party in order to increase your own profiteering - i.e. stepping on other's toes, cheating.

Greyhat = Methods which are probably blackhat, but have not been defined as such, so exist in the "gray area". Not all the rules of internet marketing have been written yet.

The above are my own personal definitions for internet marketing in general. I have been a victim of black hat crap in the past - which is why I include the "detriment another party" portion of the definition.

Examples of Blackhat:

* Engaging in click fraud
* Domain/brand hijacking
* Stealing content/plagiarism
* Content cloaking
* Sending spam
* Selling "opt out" email lists
* Traffic inflation techniques

Plenty of more exist, but those are pretty clear-cut examples of "Black Hat" internet marketing techniques.

-7

White hat - an honest and following the rules method, slower to see results, works for long term
Blackhat - often cheating to get people sign up for an offer,fast to see reults, works for short term (because you get ban after you get caught)

Greyhat - mixture of the two above?

Blackhat SEO is only term search engines have brought up. Everything automated is blackhat SEO if you ask search engines. In reality there's no difference between whitehat SEO and blackhat SEO. In both you have to drop links. If you choose to go with spamming 100000s of links to Wordpress comments with same "great post" comment, then I don't think you are blackhat, you are just plain stupid. However when automation is done right, you can achieve amazing results in very little time and it's all automated. If you ask search engines, that's blackhat SEO.

When you talk about blackhat and whitehat you need to remember that term blackhat is used widely. For example some people who break into databases and steal shit are calling themselves blackhat. So I suggest using blackhat SEO when talking about things we are talking here.

blackat=fast cash.

A great idea would be to have a thread in a forum like this that tells everyone of the blak hat company that they find...and also list the whitehat companys so we can all gain good product and services instead of being ripped off...

I posted this thread because of the numerous blackhat WSOs going on at the moment and the prevalence of it coming up again and again here on the WF (which has since been squashed by Joe Chill).

A couple of the "blackhat" methods (for CPA) that was advertised didn't seem so unethical so I was wondering if it was just an advertising method to get people to buy (which would seem unethical in itself).

Since PPC, SEO, and email lists seem to be the big thing in IM, I was wondering if these were the only ways that were considered whitehat.

I also wasn't sure if offline was allowed or if this was considered "blackhat". I was just wondering so I could stay on the "good" side.

The naming idea of White and black hat techniques come from western movies.

In western movies white hat guys are the good guys and Black hat guys are the bad guys.

So similarly in its tightest version it means that Black hat methods are illegal/unetchical methods, while White hat methods are legal/ethical methods.

Due to the terms used so much and there not really being exact definition this term keeps changing its meaning.

For example someone might name his product "Superior Black hat marketing" even it doesnt contain any illegal/unethical methods at all, but it sounds good and since people notice the naming black hat method and think it must be something really secret thing since they dont even know what it means.

Basically in SEO White hat methods are thought to be things where you optimize your page so that you for example add links to your website to relevant places where it actually belongs.

On the otherhand Black Hat SEO methods are considered to be things like posting your links everywhere, refardless if they even belong there (spamming forums), or using so called link farms, which are sites linking to each other just to get you higher ranked on searc hengines even those pages dont have anything to do with each other.

Also trying to optimize your page to be found with words that dont have anything to do with your page. Say you try to et number one spot on search term "President Obama" when your page is actually about page optimization and has nothing to do with any politics or celebrities.

Shortly on usage is that black hat methods are basically very efficient on getting you ranked, but bad side is that first of all they are mostly unethical (just think if every page had been black hat optimized, it could be that you wouldnt find a thing from internet since searching with any term would always bring 10 pages of search results that have nothing to do with your topic) and secondly and more improtantly, google tries to figure out all these blac hat methods and when it does, they fix the code to recognise these kind of pages and either push them down on ranking or even banish them completely.

If i rightly remember it was BMWs website that got banished from Google completely for a while since the firm they used to optimize their website used black hat techniques.

So shortly, for everyones benefit, please use white hat techniques, its propably the winner in the end anyway as search engines advance.

Besides, thanks to anti black hat methods, there are already some very useful websites that google mistakes being black hat optimized since they use the same stuff but for purpose, and that is loss for all.

For simple terms to explain the difference, Imran Naseem has got it bang on.

I do both, I first started with some black hat methods (Job posting on CL and GumTree), Do a bit of cookie stuffing, another BH method.

Another way to look at it is:
WhiteHat - Long term business
BlackHat - Short term cash

With BlackHat you coudnt really build a business with the methods as you could get caught any day. I lost £11K in feb with cookie stuffing.

Whitehat method takes time to get results but good for long term on other side with blackhat methods you can expects quick results but does not last long.

Share those whitehat methods with us, TE2! And what's all that shite about SEO from Bugala? Kiitos Finnish friend, but this is the CPA forum, completely different meanings of these terms here, nothing to do with SEO...

Remember "SPY vs SPY" ... MAD Magazine ... lol ...

The term blackhat has morphed into something else these days.

Most real blackhatter's will tell you what they do is whitehat, just automated and scaled.