Are You White hat, Gray Hat or Black Hat and why?

Robin Hood = White Hat

Justifies his thievery behind the fact that what he does is good in comparison to what others do. (I steal from the rich, but since I give to the poor, what I do is okay)



Blackbeard = Black Hat

Knows that his thievery is equally just as wrong as any other form of thievery, no matter what the circumstances, thus doesn't give a damn either way. (Theft is theft no matter how you explain it away)

Not bad son, not bad at all.

We are missing a middle class in the gray section.


Light grey:

A well build private blog network and tiered link building done in such way that the properties or feeder domains rank for closely related keywords, using a dark grey method to rank those feeder sites. Using only unique written content for the tier 1 links.

Extremely suitable for wannabee authority sites I would say.


Dark grey:

A private blog network where we use spun content and build 100's of links within minutes. Very cheap but at the same time still very effective. Under dark grey I would also place networks like SAPE / Link Authority / and some others that passed the test of time.

Perfect to rank feeder sites, web2.0's, churn & burn money type of sites.


At least that's the way I am heading now and to me that seems the most efficient way to scale up whenever you want without being dependent on content that go's viral, extremely expensive pieces of content like Neil Patel does where they said they often spend $50,000 to design a page (whitehat) or blackhat where the timeline of the rankings is too short for me to build a website for and which has a huge learning curve to get successful with it while a blog network is pretty easy to setup for everyone when you do a little research and when you have some money to invest.

However the money aspect applies to all methods, can't make money without investing:

- whitehat: large investments in time and content
- grey hat: large investments in domain purchases
- black hat: large investments in time, captcha's and servers

I'm White Hat because it matches my underwear.

What is "white hat" to you? If you don't mind.

If you really believe that then why is your signature violating Webmaster guidelines?

Why does one have to wear a hat?

Exactly this.

Manually building your own backlinks is a violation of Google Webmaster guidelines. Unless you write great content and let people link to you naturally (good luck with that) you're straying to the Dark Side.

"White Hat" is a term made up by folk so they can feel better about themselves when link building.

Hi Matthew,

How did you get such a jaded opinion?

I have to wholeheartedly disagree with your assertion.

Search engines have always advocated meritorious link building. Without links the World Wide Web would not exist and neither would search engines. There is nothing wrong with building links on your content as long as it is done in a way that is relevant, useful and adds value for users.

black hat for quick money, and consistently grey or "light grey" as another poster pointed out for more long term ventures.

I would also point out that there really is no such thing as white hat, most any type of self promotion is generally frowned upon by Google I believe.

Are you joking? It's hard to tell if that's sarcasm. I hope so because you have sig links for SEO purposes.

Plus, what good is a white hat site if your competitors know how to spam it to death for you?

I guess that means your screwed then.
Spun/Tiered/Web2.0 anyone?

Or Methuselah

Indeed, because it doesn't get any whiter than dropping keyword targeted backlinks in unrelated forum signatures :p

repeat

Hate the game, not the player.

This post made me laugh. And for that, you get a thanks!

Exactly what I was thinking reading this thread.

Not everybody grasps the idea of what white hat actually suppose to refer to.

Man are you that stupid that you can't even drop a spam link on your spam post? Seriously?

That's a pretty hard game to play.

So, if you want to get super-technical, most of the people on here are blackhatters. Just varying extremes.