SEO: Black Hats Vs White Hats

There are two broad categories in which most search engine optimisation techniques can usually be placed. Search engines take considerable notice to how webmasters go about improve a website’s position in search term rankings and to ensure they keep their practices ethical.

‘White hat’ practices are more ethical and due to their compliance with the guidelines of the search engines, tend to have longer lasting effects on their search results. ‘Black hat’ activities are usually picked up by the search engines which often cause websites to get banned from their results and people who use these techniques expect to have only short term results.

An SEO technique is considered to be ‘white hat’ if it does not intend to deceive the search engine and ensures that the content the engine indexes and ranks is the same content that will be accessed by the user. The general ethos of white hat practices is to generate content for users, not engines rather than exploiting the algorithms and tricking the spiders.

‘Black hat’ SEO techniques involve the swindling of the search engine. It includes techniques such as ‘cloaking’, a technique that provides a different web page depending on whether it is being requested by a human or a search engine; it then gives the search engines exactly what they are looking for. Some web developers also chose to use hidden text filled with keywords that is located off screen or in the same colour as the background and cannot be seen by humans.

Search engines will penalize sites they find using black hat techniques either by reducing their ranking or removing them from the results altogether. These penalties can either be applied by the automated algorithms or manually. Some large companies have been hit by this, for example in 2006 BMW Germany was removed from Google results for deceptive practices, they quickly apologised, fixed the pages and were subsequently restored to Google’s listing.

Internet marketing is a difficult field, and to gain a full understanding we suggest you read wideley on the subject, and recommend the SEO Cheshire Blog