Please define "White Hat" and "Black Hat"

I feel more comfortable with white hat in summer season

lol!

Well I did ask for that.

Pretty much white hat is manual and non spammy

Black hat is well the opposite... Spammy and automated

Although according to Google Blackhat is when you PERSONALLY build backlinks to your website... So they expect only your visitors to link to you

Technically, any sort of link building is greyhat/blackhat. IMO, that includes guest posting, submissions to link directories, article directories, etc.

Whitehat tactics, again IMO, are typically a bit more creative. For example, various forms of linkbait or content you create that you anticipate will attract the attention (and links) ....naturally.

Google has an algorithm that tries to rank the best sites as high as possible by looking at certain "factors" that are more likely to happen in "good" sites.

A whitehat tries to make his site as good as possible and hopefully since Google tries to rank "good" sites, Google will pick up on this and start ranking him higher.

A blackhat does not necessarily care about how "good" his site is. Instead he takes a look at what "factors" Google uses to decide whether a site is good or not. A blackhat then tries to make his site have as many of those traits as possible so that Google will rank his site higher (basically reverse engineering their algorithm).


An awesome blog post that gets gets shared across the internet would be a whitehat tactic.

Writing a bot to automatically post 10,000 blog comments or forum profiles would be a blackhat tactic.

A greyhat wants the best of both worlds and tries to build an awesome site while also doing some reverse engineering.

Black hat seo is an unethical way of doing the seo techniques which doesn't follow search engine norms and regulations. It is a spamming techniques. Whereas White hat seo is an ethical way of doing the seo techniques that follow search engine rules.

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The white hat looks like a pimp hat, lol.

White hat is manually way and black hat is opposite just like the using any automated software ,,,,,,,,

If any search engine optimization work is going out of search engines optimization rules(provided by google) that is calld black hat.

Black hat breaks the current rules and eventually gets you penalized. A lot of what is now black hat used to be white hat but as those techniques became more known and more popular, some people without patience went a bit crazy and spoiled the technique for everyone else. Follow the rules but tweak the techniques until they work for you. Eventually others will analyze your success and the technique will be overused. Google will then decide its bad. So then you start over.

Anything that is purposely done to manipulate your search rankings non-naturally is Black hat, strictly speaking.

That means, when you write an article on ezinearticles, for the purpose of a backlink, that is purposely trying to manipulate your rankings, against G's TOS, and hence black hat.

The term "White hat SEO" therefore, in terms of off page SEO, is redundant. It does not exist, strictly speaking.

However, commonly, many SEO companeis refer to white hat SEO as private link exchanges, guest posting and relatively slow, manual work in order to obtain high quality links. Black hat on the other hand is referred to as using automated tools to blast many links any and everywhere. While these two definitions are strictly incorrect, they are more common than the correct definition above.

In definitive terms

white hat is doing what Google explicitly tells you to do (which ironically has nothing to do with increasing SERP's, just "getting discovered")

Webmaster Guidelines - Webmaster Tools Help
http://static.googleusercontent.com/...rter-guide.pdf (not sure if this is the most recent one)

black hat is everything else (and in strictest terms includes literally every link building technique)

The more important question is does this really matter? No - Google will never tell you exactly what to do to get your site ranked and SEO's will always be running tests to find out what really works and what doesn't.

The better approach is to not worry about what other people call your link building techniques and just do what gets results.

Is white hat gonna be effective, but will black hat get you bounced? Perhaps gray-hatting it is the only thing that makes sense. OR you can just make a lot of really great content.

Best way to explain is White hat google likes, black hat google will ban you. For more info on white hat tactics just google White hat seo penguin and the first one has everything youll need

Hope it helps

If you have to fully depend on whitehat SEO then you can wait a long time although a way of doing whitehat would be to write engaging content, upload it on your site, and promote your site through other ways like social media or PPC. So that people can visit your site outside of Google and then link back to it from their blogs or websites. That way you gain backlinks and then you start ranking in Google.

For most sites it's hardly doable though, I mean people are not using social media to find their electrician or to buy a washing machine and they are definitely not going to link sites that offer such services or products so the only choice is greyhat SEO, as in building links yourself in a responsible / careful way.

Then there is blackhat SEO which involves spamming sites diehard with tools like AMR, Xrumer, Scrapebox, SenukeX. I feel a little bad to put Scrapebox in the same list cause that tool can be used for MUCH more other things then pure spamming. I use Scrapebox almost daily without spamming a single site.

In a few lines, white hat SEO is doing seo the "legal" way, which is not trying to cheat the search engines algorithms.
Black hat SEO is using SEO techniques which are trying with tricks to cheat the search engines in order to be ranked higher.