What is White hat SEO? [Confused]

I hope this will be helpful to get some clear idea about this topic:

IamKing said:

I hope this will be helpful to get some clear idea about this topic:

Code:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-penguin-update-whiteboard-friday

Click to expand...

It's a decent read, Seomoz have some useful stuff, don't think it's worth the membership though.

No such thing as White Hat SEO.

It is clear many people here don't know what "SEO" really means. Search Engine Optimization is making your website work WITH the search engines. It isn't attempting to rank higher, it is simply making your website efficient to crawl/index, making the content clear to the spiders/algorithm so they know exactly what your content is about, and what key phrase search results your site should show up in, and having fast loading times. That is it.

That is what search engine optimization is.

BlackHat Seo is not SEO at all, it is actually search engine manipulation. Google trusts their algorithm. They don't need you to build links with a certain anchor text in order to rank you for it. They don't believe that is helping optimize their results. They believe that is actually doing the opposite, it is skewing the results and providing for a less satisfactory experience for their users.

So in fact, BlackHat SEO is the opposite of optimization in Googles eyes.

If you find yourself needing to build links to your site, do it, but don't take that action simply because you are trying to get your website a higher ranking. If you KNEW that building that backlink wouldn't help your website AT ALL in the SERPs, would you still be building it? Or are you just doing it because you think it will get you a higher ranking?

That is the question which determines whitehat/blackhat seo.

People have a tendency to split things into good and evil, light and darkness, god and devil, love and hate, white hat seo and black hat seo. There are 2 types of SEO, and millions of types in between them. those 2 types are: seo that works and seo that doesn't work. Black or white is irellevant.

Just to explain where all this came though...

A long time ago some folks called hackers decided to identify themselves as white hat and black hat depending on whether they did illegal thinks like hack into somebody's computers or network (black hat) or protect somebody's computers and network (white hat). There's also gray hat which basically were those that went "black" if needed to protect or which switched depending on what they needed.

In SEO, folks simply copied that from the hackers. Don't be fooled though. SEOs are not even 5% as skilled as real hackers are. Hacking is like playing piano. It takes a lifetime of dedication to become good at it. To get a SEO to do what a serious hacker does might take you years. To make a hacker do what a SEO does might take him 1 week if he's completely clueless.

Thing with SEO is black hat methods don't exist anymore except where you basically break the law. Everything that was blackhat years ago now is mainstream. so we can't really talk about real blackhat stuff that is secret and nobody knows about and so on.

But in the end it is just names given to smething because people liek to give names to things. You could have other explanations as well, depends on how you want to look at it. For me this is the best explanation/history of the colors of SEO.

Blackhat SEO - exploiting the search engine algorithms to make your site rank higher
Whitehat SEO - Any method making your site a search engine friendly, like organizing the
site with sitemaps (which helps in better crawling). Removing any errors
from your site pages etc.

White hat is any technique that Sir Matt and Googliath approve of whereas black hat just pisses them off because your trying to game their gamy bird.

james406 Nicely Explained Thanks

To me, white hat SEO is just putting up a website, optimizing the experience and pages, and letting everything else happen on its own. Black hat is any method that accelerates ranking, regardless of whether its "legal" or not.

White is the SEO is not supported and is not legally authorized.....black hat is the actual authorized.....

seo-dude said:

Blackhat SEO - exploiting the search engine algorithms to make your site rank higher
Whitehat SEO - Any method making your site a search engine friendly, like organizing the
site with sitemaps (which helps in better crawling). Removing any errors
from your site pages etc.

Click to expand...

This guy gave a completely correct and easy to understand answer. Perfect!

seo-dude said:

Blackhat SEO - exploiting the search engine algorithms to make your site rank higher
Whitehat SEO - Any method making your site a search engine friendly, like organizing the
site with sitemaps (which helps in better crawling). Removing any errors
from your site pages etc.

Click to expand...

This.

When i think white hat i think of the most honest way to get the word out. no tricks to get noticed, rank higher, or more traffic. Doing most of the work yourself and not trying to mass produce or steal anything.

If you can rank #1 without spreading a single post on other websites yourself, simply from people noticing your blog or site and commenting on it elsewhere referring people to it because its simply good content. Then it doesn't get any more white hat then that.

Black hat is usually about quantity over quality, crank it out fast cheep and anyway that works. IM (Internet Marketing) is about making money after all. Some people don't mind taking advantage of others or using means that might seem unfair to their competition, those are usually black hat methods.

i like to think grey hat is usually where most of the honest people are. If you are not a little competitive then you often times cant make it.

Just try and be as white hat as you can be, and you shouldn't have any problems.

james406

Nice info, and great sharing

Whitehat seo - It's like playing counter strike purely with skills. you can give boosts to your teammate, bind keys for faster messages etc. it's really optimizing your victory cleverly but still playing by the "rules".
Blackhat seo - Using wallhack, aimbot etc
1 thing to note is that there isn't really any use of being fair and playing by the rules when even 1 person on the public server is not following them. That is even if your site is super awesome and extraordinary Blackhat is the only way to go (you can't outdo an aimbotter no matter how much of a pro you are now ,can you?).
Just my opinion.

Getting harder and harder to diffuse the two but blackhat can be considered anything done with bots or programs.

i'd pretty much pitch white hat as what i did before i found these forums. Clean web design built properly, playing by google's recommednations, writing articles/other PR work and asking them to be posted on news/blog sites. Anything that is unquestionably ethical to me basically.

7-8 out of 10 sites ranking in top 10 results for competitive terms are either grey or black hat sites. Only white hat sites i see are sites like apple.com, and other big brands.

There is no whitehat seo

Just like everyone is saying, white hat SEO is when you are not buying any backlinks, you are not spamming your contents with keywords, and you are not stuffing your website with internal links. It is pretty much doing what the rules say you do.