What is Grey Hat SEO ?

Brad Gosse

14 years ago

Grey hat is like grey market. You are walking the line between black and white without crossing

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Michael Nguyen

14 years ago

Just a few examples

whitehat = ezine articles backlinking

blackhat = keyword stuffing "whitening" keyword text in attemp to fool SE

greyhat = spamming the se with profile backlinks on the sly, or blog commenting useless comments like "This is a good post and I will tell me friends"

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yusufjaafar

14 years ago

From what I know, it is not white hat and not grey hat. It is in between of them.
We can say it not a good method and also not a bad method.

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TristanPerry

14 years ago

Greyhat is blacker than white and whiter than black.

Or as Brad says, it's somewhere in-between; you're walking 'the line'

So it might be (IMO) something like building forum profile backlinks. It's not 100% whitehat, but it's also not really spammy and black-hat either.

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mookinman

14 years ago

Yes, the clue is in the name! Not quite white but not quite black... Personally I think the only way to build rank these days is with quality unique content, and plenty of it.

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ankur sharma

14 years ago

Forget grey, white black , pink hat. Just get a .info domain name and start testing all the seo strategies you hear, read or listen. See if you see increase in rankings or not. There is no grey, white black thing. There are only 2 things, one is which "works" and other, which "doesnt work".

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Michael Oksa

14 years ago

In theory, I think almost every "white hat" technique is really grey hat. Why? Because as soon as you do anything to game a system in any way, you have drifted to the grey side of things.

True white hat, the way I define it (which I admit may stray from the standard definition), is nearly impossible, but it could be done, I suppose.

There is one other element that comes into play, but it makes the lines even more blurry, and that's the intent of the person using the techniques. However, you have to be careful that intent isn't confused with justification.

All the best,
Michael

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CDarklock

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Michael Oksa

True white hat, the way I define it (which I admit may stray from the standard definition), is nearly impossible, but it could be done, I suppose.

White hat SEO, to me, is anything that makes it easier for the search engines to do their job. It's not designed to make your ranking better - it's designed to get the ranking you deserve faster. Keeping an accurate sitemap is white hat, for example.

In my book, "grey hat" is really just another term for "black hat but you probably won't get caught."

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Michael Oksa

14 years ago

Originally Posted by CDarklock

White hat SEO, to me, is anything that makes it easier for the search engines to do their job. It's not designed to make your ranking better - it's designed to get the ranking you deserve faster. Keeping an accurate sitemap is white hat, for example.

In my book, "grey hat" is really just another term for "black hat but you probably won't get caught."

I like your definition as well, Caliban. I don't see it as artificial. Perhaps my definition could be amended a bit.

~Michael

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cashcow

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Michael Oksa

In theory, I think almost every "white hat" technique is really grey hat. Why? Because as soon as you do anything to game a system in any way, you have drifted to the grey side of things.

That's exactly the way I see it too. Actually, I think "gray hat" is just a term that people like to use so that they don't have to feel so dirty doing their black hat techniques.

Lee

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mikebrooks

14 years ago

I agree with this. If Google were to define this, they would probably say white hat is having a blog or website and using their webmaster tools.

Anything outside of that they'd consider black hat. I have the feeling that if you sent google a picture of yourself that said 'hey google, i'm an online marketer', they'd draw a little black hat on top of your head.

Originally Posted by Michael Oksa

In theory, I think almost every "white hat" technique is really grey hat. Why? Because as soon as you do anything to game a system in any way, you have drifted to the grey side of things.

True white hat, the way I define it (which I admit may stray from the standard definition), is nearly impossible, but it could be done, I suppose.

There is one other element that comes into play, but it makes the lines even more blurry, and that's the intent of the person using the techniques. However, you have to be careful that intent isn't confused with justification.

All the best,
Michael

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cloudnomadic

14 years ago

Exactly Micheal I could not have put it beeter so i didnot :-)

As to somebodies suggestion of buying .info and testing black hat ideas to see what you get away with MY GOD thats plain daft...

Originally Posted by Michael Oksa

In theory, I think almost every "white hat" technique is really grey hat. Why? Because as soon as you do anything to game a system in any way, you have drifted to the grey side of things.

True white hat, the way I define it (which I admit may stray from the standard definition), is nearly impossible, but it could be done, I suppose.

There is one other element that comes into play, but it makes the lines even more blurry, and that's the intent of the person using the techniques. However, you have to be careful that intent isn't confused with justification.

All the best,
Michael

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hireava

14 years ago

considered as both white hat and black hat but may involve some risks. Example is link buying.

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JonAlfredsson

14 years ago

I agree. it's being on the middle ground of the two approaches. Found a link that compare and contrast the three approaches. You can also learn more about this approach by learning the grey hat procedures.

Hope these will help.

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logoonlinepros

Banned 14 years ago

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Tom Goodwin

14 years ago

Originally Posted by logoonlinepros

The following tactics fall in the grey area between legitimate tactics and search engine spam. They include tactics such as cloaking, paid links, duplicate content and a number of others. Unless you are on the correct side of this equation these tactics are not recommended.In other words, how to use stuff like cloaking to get good seach engine results, but make sure the visitor/surfer also finds what the were searching for, so everyone is happy..

I'm pretty sure many would define cloaking (as Google defines it) as blackhat.

One other type of item that has been put up is actual fraud. For instance, cookie stuffing, I think by anyone's definition would be blackhat as it is actually financial fraud.

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cashcow 14 years ago

Originally Posted by logoonlinepros

They include tactics such as cloaking, paid links, duplicate content and a number of others.

I don't think duplicate content has a hat. I mean dupe content happens naturally on blogs. If you submit articles to article directories and people syndicate them then there is dupe content on different sites. To me (and that is just my humble opinion) that's not really white, gray or black.
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George Phillip

14 years ago

Whitehat - regular seo, linkbuilding, article marketing, content creation.

Greyhat - Duplicate content, Paid links,keyword spying, scraping etc

Black.Hat - Stealing google maps listings, Editing wikipedia pages, Hijackin IP's and writing citations, CSing, Gateway Pages, Link Bombing, .Htaccess exploits, and other cool stuff.

find out more

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Tom Goodwin

14 years ago

Originally Posted by George Phillip

Whitehat - regular seo, linkbuilding, article marketing, content creation.

Greyhat - Duplicate content, Paid links,keyword spying, scraping etc

Black.Hat - Stealing google maps listings, Editing wikipedia pages, Hijackin IP's and writing citations, CSing, Gateway Pages, Link Bombing, .Htaccess exploits, and other cool stuff.

find out more

Since when is syndicating content greyhat?

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CDarklock 14 years ago

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

Since when is syndicating content greyhat?

It's one thing to syndicate content.

It's quite another to put twenty copies of the same blog with the same articles in different folders on your website.
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- Tom Goodwin 14 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by CDarklock
  
  It's one thing to syndicate content.
  
  It's quite another to put twenty copies of the same blog with the same articles in different folders on your website.
  
  Of course it is. My point was that it is foolish to give a "hat" label to duplicate content. It can be good and it can be bad.
  
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  CDarklock 14 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin
  
  Of course it is. My point was that it is foolish to give a "hat" label to duplicate content. It can be good and it can be bad.
  
  Which is why it's grey. Maybe you're doing a good thing. Maybe you're doing a bad thing. There's no way to know without taking a closer look at what you're doing.
  
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  "The Golden Town is the Golden Town no longer. They have sold their pillars for brass and their temples for money, they have made coins out of their golden doors. It is become a dark town full of trouble, there is no ease in its streets, beauty has left it and the old songs are gone." - Lord Dunsany, The Messengers
  
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IndigoJack

14 years ago

Originally Posted by George Phillip

Whitehat - regular seo, linkbuilding, article marketing, content creation.

Greyhat - Duplicate content, Paid links,keyword spying, scraping etc

Black.Hat - Stealing google maps listings, Editing wikipedia pages, Hijackin IP's and writing citations, CSing, Gateway Pages, Link Bombing, .Htaccess exploits...

What the heck is "scraping"? Sounds revolting what ever it is.

I suspect a lot of newbies to seo & im will be using black hat techniques without even realising it - they won't even know there is a word or definition for the type of activities they are involved in.

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Tom Goodwin

14 years ago

Originally Posted by IndigoJack

I suspect a lot of newbies to seo & im will be using black hat techniques without even realising it - they won't even know there is a word or definition for the type of activities they are involved in.

Or perhaps they simply define hats differently than you, and don't put the same sort of moral/ethical attachments to them?

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IndigoJack 14 years ago

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

Or perhaps they simply define hats differently than you, and don't put the same sort of moral/ethical attachments to them?

Well, that applies to the whole discussion!

One persons black is another's off-white. It's only if you get your wrist slapped or others ban & block you that you would start to suspect that your methods aren't to everyones taste.
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Matt Bard

14 years ago

You properly pay the sales department $100 to have your advertising pamphlet in the Sunday paper = Whitehat

You pay the paperboy $50 to slip your pamphlet in with the others = Black

You follow the paperboy Sunday morning and lay your pamphlet next to the newspaper = Grey

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CDarklock

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Matt M

You pay the paperboy $50 to slip your pamphlet in with the others = Black

You follow the paperboy Sunday morning and lay your pamphlet next to the newspaper = Grey

I'd alter that a bit.

You find out where the paperboy lives and put your pamphlets on top of the Sunday paper inserts when his distributor drops them off - Grey

You didn't pay him to do it, or even instruct him to do it, but the paperboy will still assume he's supposed to put one pamphlet inside each paper anyway. So he'll do it. Meanwhile, all you did was give him your pamphlets! You didn't tell him what to do with them! It was all his idea!

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Kalpana Iyer

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Matt M

You properly pay the sales department $100 to have your advertising pamphlet in the Sunday paper = Whitehat

You pay the paperboy $50 to slip your pamphlet in with the others = Black

You follow the paperboy Sunday morning and lay your pamphlet next to the newspaper = Grey

That was a very nice description!

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DogScout

14 years ago

Much has to do with intent... for example, commenting on a blog so that other readers of that blog will be interested enough in your comment to check out your site is white hat.
commenting on a blog so the SEs will count another back-link and raise your site in the rankings is gray hat.

White hat blog commenting helps everyone. A well thought out interesting comment helps the blog you are commenting on, gets readers to check out your site, adds a back-link to your site AND if your site is written for people, not search engines, the readers will pass on links to your posts and blog in social sites in order to share cool information with their friends. Writing good and readable, interesting, provocative and slightly controversial posts/content on your site will produce more 'natural' back-links then you could afford to buy or have the time to create.

It can take longer to rank doing it completely white hat, but in the end, you win. IMHO. Just as you will not build a thriving business in a day (except by luck or an epiphany) neither will you get on page 1 of Google in a day using total white hat methods. BUT, if you are in it for the long run, the final result will be stronger, less likely to 'dance' and produce consistent returns.

To decide to go completely white hat will take longer. It will takes spending more time on content or paying more for it. But owning an 'authority' site in a niche will eventually produce more income than 100 mini-sites ranked thru black and/or gray techniques. (I think?)

(At least in a perfect world... which this one is NOT. The above OPINION was arrived upon by seeing what sites were consistently selling 7 figure sales a month and comparing their back-links, content, keyword percent, etc. Of all the factors involved, readable, interesting content seemed to be the common denominator. Some of those high producing sites did no artificial back-linking (that I could tell) and had 100,000-1,000,000 or more back-links, each from a different place. Those might be paid for or created by the site, but that would be expensive from what I've seen. That being said, I am not above a few extra back-links. Lol).

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Tom Goodwin

14 years ago

Originally Posted by DogScout

(At least in a perfect world... which this one is NOT. The above OPINION was arrived upon by seeing what sites were consistently selling 7 figure sales a month and comparing their back-links, content, keyword percent, etc. Of all the factors involved, readable, interesting content seemed to be the common denominator. Some of those high producing sites did no artificial back-linking (that I could tell) and had 100,000-1,000,000 or more back-links, each from a different place. Those might be paid for or created by the site, but that would be expensive from what I've seen. That being said, I am not above a few extra back-links. Lol).

Apples and oranges i'm afraid.

I think the problem with looking at these sites is that sites doing these sort of sales per month, are generally going to have full-time staff of >100 (if not many thousands), >$1Million in month advertising, marketing and related matters, and have been in business a very long time with a domain that has been in existence a very long time. If I had this sort of business I wouldn't be doing blog commenting either.

Of course this sort of site isn't going to rely on blog commenting or throwing up some profiles or whatever. They get backlinks because people know about them because (1) they have been around a long time, and (2) they've been hit with their marketing blitz in one form or another (maybe hired Jay-Z to fondle your laptop), and they have some useful content (sometimes) created by the huge staff or outsourced for $$$$$.

Looking at how Coca-Cola got its backlinks just isn't effective for figuring out how to get backlinks to your "get rid of a yeast infection" site.

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Tom Goodwin

14 years ago

Originally Posted by pankajarya

Recently i came across few site . which were telling about Grey Hat, Black hat and while hat SEO techniques.
I understand that Black Hat SEO should be avoided.
but i didn't find a clear guidelines for Grey hat SEO ? can anyone update me on this ?
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TheOverall

14 years ago

Imho if you go grey, you might as well go full-on black, because unless you're a master AdWords spender, Google will likely not be in favor of your techniques if they find out.

And getting out of the sandbox is really, really hard...

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Matt Bard

14 years ago

Caliban,

...but the paperboy will still assume he's supposed to...

I was going for the reader. That he will assume that the paper approved my ad (it just fell out of the stack), thereby giving it the credibility.

But I agree that your analogy is a better one in this case.

p.s. For those still confused on the subject of Duplicate Content...Google's definition is when you duplicate keywords, phrases, or blocks of content on your page/site in an attempt to fool, mislead, deceive...the search engine (Google) into giving you a better ranking.

Google views submitting an article to several directories or blogs as 'syndication' and there is no problem with article syndication.

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Banned 14 years ago

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Cataclysm1987 14 years ago

White hat would be manually submitting content and comments to blogs, forums and article directories in order to build backlinks to your sites.

Grey hat would be buying links or blasting profile links and RSS feeds with software like XRumer, SENuke or Nuclear link blaster. Likely to get you sandboxed, but not at all likely to get you banned or in serious trouble.

Black hat would be things like cookie theft, site cloaking and site hijacking. Big no no's that you can potentially get caught for.

The reason grey hat won't get you caught is because it primarily involves one way link structures. You can't necessarily be held accountable for a one way link. Someone else could be spamming your site with links to get it banned or de indexed.

However, Google still does not like it and they will try to keep you from getting link juice any way they can. Most of the things people define as Grey hat, Google will refer to as black hat. So be careful!
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mikkosant

14 years ago

Whitehat in my opinion is just doing the basics and following what google shows in their guidelines, making your site search friendly, getting your anchor text down, internal linking, etc...

Grey hat is more about doing things that are somewhat spammy and don't really add value to the internet. Making a cool software tool and allowing people to link to it is whitehat, but I mean, if you are just making a ton of affiliate sites, then you probably don't have time for linkbait and so forth. Guest blogging though is a great whitehat way of getting yourself out there along with a quality link.

Blackhat is more related to cloaking and keyword stuffing, along with other things.

Cheers

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sarahberra

14 years ago

If you plan on using gray hat or black hat tactics make sure that each site has it's own IP address and use a different host for your other sites. If they catch on they can take all your sites down quickly. Don't leave a paper trail.

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jhonsean

14 years ago

white hat is the ethical way of SEO on the other hand black hat is the unethical one while GRAY hat is the one the walks between those two.

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Kurt

14 years ago

White hat: You drive your car down the street.

Grey hat: You carve a reverse image of your URL into your car tires so whenever you go through a puddle, snow or sand, you leave a temporary imprint of your URL that doesn't hurt anything.

Black hat: You carve a reverse image of your URL into your car tires, then go looking for freshly painted traffic lines so your URL is permanently painted on the roads by your car tires. (WSO coming soon.)

SEO Team: You use the HOV lane.

Green hat: You take a bus.

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SEO Company

14 years ago

Grey = white+black

White hat SEO means SEO techniques which are well accepted by search engines

Black hat tactics are those which the search engines do not consider ethical.

Grey hat means anything between these two.

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stechmendonca5 14 years ago

white hat is the honorable style of Search Engine Optimisation on the other hand black hat is the wrong one while GRAY hat is the one the walks between those two because it is a combination of white & black hat .
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Mcrofts

14 years ago

This is an Example of Grey Hat, Youv'e got your Money Site, you then Have a "Link Wheel'
Let's say 8 Blog Site's They all link from one to the next going around.
You Can Build a PR3 Site Within a Few Month's.
In your Link Wheel you could have 2Related Site's linking to your Money Site, while those 2 have Blog's going round & round Linking from one to the next to your's

When you have a Web of Site's all Connected but.. Connected so you can't really tell & the aim is to just Help boost your one Site. Thats Grey Hat

That's why People Use C Class Ip's When they have alot of Minisite's
If google Saw all the Website's have the Same/Similar Ip's you could be "Punished"

*Alot you Hear will also Just be Speculation

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fanatic123

14 years ago

That's simple, grey is the mixture of white and black. Means greyhat SEO is the mid of Black and white SEO.

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What is Grey Hat SEO ?

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