Why You Should Stay Away From "Black Hat" SEO
Black hat SEO means using unethical or unnatural methods to achieve high search engine rankings. White hat SEO, on the other hand, means building a site’s rankings using legitimate techniques.
Specific examples of on-page black hat vs. white SEO may include keyword stuffing. A black hatter will build a useless Website, then stuff its pages with keywords, visible or hidden, while a white hatter will write high quality, relevant content, then sprinkle keywords into the text in a way that helps search engines correctly index the page without interfering with user experience.
Off-page white hat SEO may include article marketing - submitting articles, which contain a link to your Website, to reputable article directories such as EzineArticles. Black hate off-page SEO techniques may include, for example, blog comment spam.
The basic difference between black hat SEO and white hat SEO boils down to transparency. When we here at SEO UK work to improve your search engines rankings, we’re being very transparent about it. We’re not trying to “game the system” or to trick search engines. On the contrary, we believe that companies, users and search engines all have a shared goal of making the search process better and making sure that when someone searches for a keyword, only the best, most relevant sites come up in the search results.
White hat SEO, UK or international, contributes to a better user experience, leading users to legitimate, high-quality sites that are relevant to their search, while black hat SEO creates a frustrating experience for users, causing them to land on spam sites that do not contain the information they were looking for.
Which is why Google, in recent years, has been in an all-out war against black hat SEO companies, and the good news is, Google is winning. While in the past it was fairly easy to start a spam Website, stuff it with keywords and get it to the front page of search results, over the years Google has put mechanisms in place to make sure that new sites cannot climb to the top of the SERPs overnight. It takes months for a new Website to gain Google’s trust, and most black hat spammers simply cannot afford waiting for so long.
By forcing new Websites to have a wait period before they enter the search results (we call it the Google Sandbox), and by demanding that they have links from reputable sites pointing at them before they can gain Google’s trust, Google has made spammers’ lives much more difficult.
The result is that many black hat SEO companies have moved on to the next thing, and we were left with a better, cleaner Internet.
Black hat SEO is about short-term success in bringing one’s site to the top of the search results for highly profitable terms, making all the money you can make until Google bans you, then moving on to the next spam site. White hat SEO UK is about long-term business success, about building a reputable, high-quality site, and getting legitimate links to point at that site, slowly moving it up the search results, all the way to the front page.
Unlike black hat SEO, white hat SEO is long-lasting, because generally, once a Website has earned Google’s trust and has received high rankings, it will generally stay high, as long as it remains legitimate and especially if it keeps getting updated with fresh content and with new inbound links.