Like any other things in the world, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has the good side and the evil side. Just like any other business practices, SEO can be done in accordance to the accepted business ethics and standards or by overstepping the boundaries of business ethics. Generally, there are two major techniques currently in use in SEO. These are black hat and white hat techniques, and everything between them is just the offspring of these two techniques. When we try to compare SEO to a movie, the white hatters are the hero while the black hatters are the villain.

Here’s the quick rundown on how both technique works:

The Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO intentionally breaks the guidelines of search engines. Black hatters employ unethical and deceitful means to attract traffic onto their sites and get high ranking. Even though, the high ranking status can be achieved through regular white SEO, making use of black hat tricks can be faster. Your page will increase dramatically in Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rank within a relatively brief amount of time. People are very impatient and cannot wait months before they reach the ranking that they desire usually employ this method.

However, search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and others are frequently updating their algorithms to detect and penalize black hat SEO. Websites that are utilizing black hat techniques are not only marked by the search engines as black hat sites, but they are also penalized and often completely removed from SERPs. When this happens, it takes months or years and sometimes never to regain your ranking.

Most common black hat SEO takes place on the design or programming of the site itself. So, effect is site wide. These tactics include: Keyword Stuffing or Hidden Text, Web Page Cloaking, Duplicating content, Link Farming or Buying Links, Pagejacking, 302 Redirect Hijacking, Doorway pages, Scraping and Spinning, Splogs and the famous Link Spamming or spamdexing.

The White Hat SEO

The white SEO is the good guy and the hero in the SEO movie. It is an SEO technique that conforms to the guidelines set by search engines and does not, intentionally deceive it. The white hat SEO is not only all about conforming to the guidelines, but also about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.

Generally, the idea of white hat technique is creating content which are useful to user and then make that content easily accessible to search engines. The primary concern of white hatters is the user friendliness and the accessibility of the site, issues on the search engine algorithms and rankings are just secondary.

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