What is Grey Hat SEO ?

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

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"

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.

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.

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.

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".

Thanks

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

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

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.

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

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

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).

Grey Hat SEO --> Stuff that actually works this decade

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...

Caliban,

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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