My name's Alec Sharratt, and I'm a search specialist here at Koozai. Today
I'm going to be talking a little bit about white hat and black hat SEO.
In order to understand the difference between those two aspects of SEO, I
think we first need to understand a bit more about where Google is coming
from. Google is primarily a search engine, and they deliver search results
to their end user. It is the relevancy of those search results that has
made them king of the search engines. They're the most relevant search
engine for what most people are looking for.
So in order to protect this relevancy and ultimately their profits, they've
created a set of guidelines, and these guidelines are freely available for
any company or website that are out there. They just list dos and don'ts
about what you can do or shouldn't do on your websites. Now these rules are
just rules. They're Google's rules. They're not laws. There's no prison
sentence associated with breaking one of Google's rules. But there are
quite stiff penalties, which can be devastating to an online business.
It's in this set of guidelines that arises the difference between white and
black hat SEO. White hat SEO, simply put, follows Google's guidelines. They
don't break or bend the rules. Whereas, black hat SEO techniques will break
the rules or bend the rules. And as such, the fundamental differences
between the two become more apparent. White hat SEO is associated with
little to no risk at all. If you follow the guidelines appropriately that
Google have sent, you're not going to get any sort of penalty or
penalization from Google.
If however, you use black hat techniques, you do run the risk of being
penalized. Now penalization can take the form of being wiped from Google's
index, and this simply means that you no longer will be able to be found
within Google, or at least your website won't be found within Google. This
can be a devastating and fatal blow to an online marketing strategy or
company's business and can result in the loss of a lot of money generated
from online resources. So, really, this risk is the fundamental difference
that separates white hat and black hat SEO.
Now there are a number of different techniques that can be used in both
quarters, and some are more clever or more subtle than others. With regards
to black hats, there are techniques that you can implement that may result
in a website not being caught by Google for a very long time, if at all.
Although their search engine robots are very clever at discovering black
hat techniques.
To give you an idea or an example of the difference between a white hat and
a black hat technique, let's take the use of keywords on page. White hat
SEO will use keywords on a page to build the relevancy for that page to
that keyword. Black hat will use keyword stuffing where the
keyword will be used over and over and over again on a page. With regards
to off page activities, link building, for example, used by many white hat
SEO consultants, you get links from other websites on the Internet that
essentially promote your website. Black hat would use link farms or buy
links from other websites, and this is definitely against Google's
guidelines.
Now the pros of using white hats or black hat SEO, I think, can become a bit
more apparent. White hat, the pro is really a lack of risk. There is no
risk involved in your website being banned from the index. But black hat
has a different pro, and that is that you can get results very, very
quickly, and depending on the industry that you're in, this may be more
relevant to what you're actually trying to achieve. If, for example, you're
in an industry where people use a sort of rinse and repeat black hat
technique, they create a website, use black hat to optimise it, get
results, make profit, get banned from Google, and then create another site
and do the same thing all over again. This can go on forever essentially.
But you're not really going to get the benefit that you get out of a long-
term online marketing strategy. So, white hat is a very stable and long-
term source of generating revenue, whereas black hat is a very immediate
way of doing that and also carries this high risk.
So there is the fundamental difference between black hat and white hat SEO.
I hope that's been of help to you. My name is Alec Sharratt. If you'd like
to see more videos by myself or any of my colleagues, please subscribe to
our YouTube channel. You can follow us on Twitter and you can like us on
Facebook, as well. Thank you for your time.