What Is Your Definition of "Black Hat SEO" + "White Hat SEO"

12 years ago

Black Hat SEO will be the punishment of google.

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mosthost

12 years ago

Originally Posted by AnythingMarketing

According to Tor Black ALL efforts done offsite to increase your SERPs is Black Hat by Google's definition.

What is YOUR definition, and where do you draw the lines in your efforts?

I agree with him (her?)

The next round of penalizations will involve guest blogging and other 'White Hat' stalwarts.

Google is on a rampage, and the color of your hat won't save you.

I already shifted my entire budget into B2B marketing automation, so I could care less.

Google is officially MySpace as far as I'm concerned

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AnythingMarketing

12 years ago

Originally Posted by mosthost

I agree with him (her?)

The next round of penalizations will involve guest blogging and other 'White Hat' stalwarts.

Google is on a rampage, and the color of your hat won't save you.

I already shifted my entire budget into B2B marketing automation, so I could care less.

Google is officially MySpace as far as I'm concerned

Tor is a he!

And are you saying Google is just good for Teenage Girls, Bands and Pedophiles now? Lol

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Eric Seiler

12 years ago

Google's policies are really the only useful way to define blackhat vs. whitehat as it pertains to SEO.

In a broader sense, whitehat is morally and ethically "good" tactics where as blackhat is considered "evil". An example outside of SEO is, a whitehat hacker tends to break into systems that he has permission to as a means for detecting security holes, where as a blackhat hacker does it to deface, destroy, steal, etc.

Going back to the SEO definition though, and where my personal tolerances are, pretty much everything is fair game as long as there is no victim. That means a lot of gray instead of strictly black or white, because doing 'harm' to google is a subjective measure and one that changes as google does.

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JSProjects

12 years ago

"White" Hat SEO is a myth. The only thing you could technically consider white hat is creating good content that is properly optimized and hoping people link to you.

I'm willing to bet that 99.99% of us are either "grey" hatters or black hatters.

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AnythingMarketing

12 years ago

Originally Posted by JSProjects

"White" Hat SEO is a myth. The only thing you could technically consider white hat is creating good content that is properly optimized and hoping people link to you.

I'm willing to bet that 99.99% of us are either "grey" hatters or black hatters.

Yep! That was Tor's point as well. He made it very clear and told everybody to just "Get over themselves!" Lol

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TheFBGuy

12 years ago

Originally Posted by JSProjects

"White" Hat SEO is a myth. The only thing you could technically consider white hat is creating good content that is properly optimized and hoping people link to you.

I'm willing to bet that 99.99% of us are either "grey" hatters or black hatters.

Indeed, no such thing as "white hat" unless people follow the saying "build it and they will come!" yeah... good luck with that

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ELVISTHEPELVIS

12 years ago

Originally Posted by JSProjects

"White" Hat SEO is a myth. The only thing you could technically consider white hat is creating good content that is properly optimized and hoping people link to you.

I'm willing to bet that 99.99% of us are either "grey" hatters or black hatters.

This is so true. I read complaints all of the time on this forum about "black hatters" meanwhile the very same people are talking about using tools such as Scrapebox, SENuke, etc.

What do you think black hat tools are people? They are basically tools which are used to make the job faster and more efficient.

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markowe

12 years ago

Originally Posted by JSProjects

"White" Hat SEO is a myth. The only thing you could technically consider white hat is creating good content that is properly optimized and hoping people link to you.

I'm willing to bet that 99.99% of us are either "grey" hatters or black hatters.

This.

Most people on this forum are black hatters, and spammers to, I might add. I am getting as far away from that game as possible.

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moneymoguls

12 years ago

All SEO in Google's eyes is Black Hat.

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aygabtu 12 years ago

How can they expect a site to get eyeballs without posting your link out there for people to see? It is rare to have an idea that goes viral. Do they expect everyone to start with adwords and hope that the people that visit via those clicks will miraculously write and post articles about your site? Should every site registered on the yahoo directory get penalized?

One of my sites competes with domains that have over 1 million backlinks. How is anyone supposed to enter that space without self-promotion? How functional can you make a site that is really going to make a dent in 10 year old established sites that have a million backlinks.

PS...I know their backlinks aren't natural either.
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dburk

12 years ago

Originally Posted by AnythingMarketing

According to Tor Black ALL efforts done offsite to increase your SERPs is Black Hat by Google's definition.

What is YOUR definition, and where do you draw the lines in your efforts?

What twisted logic. :rolleyes:

According to Google that isn't Google's definition.

Google defines acceptable and unacceptable practices and suggesting ALL SEO is " Black Hat" is just pure FUD.

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anoopsh00 12 years ago

Blackhat is an unethical part of SEO and white hat is an ethical part of SEO.
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josephseeley

12 years ago

Blackhat is where you game the system and get caught... whitehat is where you're sneaky enough about gaming the system you don't get caught!

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johnes4th

12 years ago

white hat - legal
black hat - illegal

I mean this literally, not "Google says not to do it, so it's illegal" or "it's unethical so it's illegal". If it's legal and it works, then I have no problem with it. This gives me a very bright line that tells me where to stop.

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rajnish

12 years ago

White Hat SEO is the best method for getting the best and long term results while Black Hat SEO is the illegal way to promote a website.So always use the white hat SEO for better results.

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NFN8

12 years ago

Anyone who believes in 100% "white hat" SEO is focusing on ranking one site for multiple keywords. When you're doing online reputation work, and trying to rank 20-30 sites for ONE keyword, things change.

Problem is... Google just plain gets it wrong sometimes. I have a client who's a New York Times bestselling author, founder/CEO of two active companies, produces three sites full of content, plus videos, plus Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, plus his book site(s), plus Amazon, etc., etc., etc.

And yet one PR1 hater site that hasn't been posted to in a year, and doesn't even have his name in the domain, is still stuck on page one. By any reasonable objective human analysis, that site has no business being on page one. But it is.

At that point, where's the line? At that point, I'm going to have to go with John Henderson's answer -- if it isn't illegal, it's perfectly acceptable, regardless of what Google, SearchEngineLand, or any self-proclaimed white-hatters say.

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GeolinStella

12 years ago

Black Hat technique is the illegal method to increase the visibility of your site through short cut method. White hat is legal method, it's process is very slow and steady.

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thedog 12 years ago

Until recently, I thought that it was obvious, the difference between the 2.

I stay away from the obvious black hat techniques, I've been tempted by the dark side in the past, but these days, it's just Russian Roullete.

As for white hat... well... now the things I thought were ok... are not ok, or are they?

I mean, can I have a hubpage link back to my site... is this ok?

What if my blogger page links to my hub page... is this ok, not ok....
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shiko5000

12 years ago

White Hat SEO is the safe way to profit but it takes some time
Black Hat SEO is the quickest way to profit if you use it correctly

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CyborgX

11 years ago

Common definitions of "black hat SEO" include

techniques that are illegal (e.g. hacking a competitor's site)
techniques that mislead bots (e.g. cloaking)
techniques that are risky and not disclosed to stakeholders (e.g. paid links that your client/boss doesn't know about)
techniques that are not consistent with search engines' guidelines (e.g. spammy linkbuilding)

I don't like the fourth definition, personally, because there's nothing morally wrong about trying to game the algo. I'm not ethically obligated to play by Google's rules. Their guidelines are intended to boost their business, nothing more, nothing less.
Now, whether or not a particular technique is effective is a completely different question. Some unethical and/or spammy techniques still produce results. The search engines seem to be getting better and better at punishing sites that don't follow their guidelines, so adhering to those guidelines is probably the best long-term strategy. But hey, if you're just going for fly-by-night profits, it could be very effective to exploit the stuff that still works.

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amiramin

11 years ago

White Hat = orignal content, backlinks from high PR site, no hidden text on pages, 8\10 onpage seo, manual backlinking

Black Hat = using softwares, buying links, link wheels, blog networks etc

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Thomas

11 years ago

For most people, white hat SEO is anything they do themselves; since nobody ever sees themselves as "bad", it is, therefore, good, moral, decent, etc.

Black hat SEO is anything they don't know how to do, or anything they think their competitors are doing without them knowing. Since it doesn't benefit them, and someone else is doing it, and that someone else might, in their eyes, get some advanatge over them by doing so, it is, therefore, bad, immoral, unethical, evil, etc.

See... tiz' simple!

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yukon

Banned 11 years ago

I don't even care about hats.

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TheProgrammer 11 years ago

Originally Posted by yukon

I don't even care about hats.

It seems funny to me
So you're a PPC man, aren't it?

@OP: Any technique that can be used to rank a site or manipulate the search algo is illegal in Google words, so hat colors doesn't matter white,black or orange.
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sunray

11 years ago

There's not only black and white, but all shades of grey as well. Pure white SEO should be no SEO at all. You shouldn't even think about it. If you just build a site not thinking about rating at all and let Google index it, its white hat. From the moment you visit Adwords keyword tool, and add some additional words to your content this pure white has turned into light grey. What you just did, is manipulating content in order to get more visitors that wouldn't normally come. Actually it's quite hard to see how this manipulation is more ethical than buying backlinks.