Search Engine Optimization - Which hat should you put on?

With the trend of digitization, every brand, be it giant or relatively new in the market, is running for digital presence and not surprisingly, a significant percentage of their marketing budget is used for strengthening their digital presence to reach out to maximum number of potential target customer groups, digitally.

With the increasing number of users, the competition is also being difficult for new players entering the market regularly and this is true for any industry - so, how would one company/brand make sure that its digital presence is strong enough to suppress others? How would it make sure that whenever customers search for their need online, they would be the first to be reached out to? - There comes search engine optimization (SEO).

It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have primary search results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.

Through SEO, one can affect the visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine's unpaid results. In a nutshell, earlier (or, higher ranked) the item is on the list of search results, more will be the hit by the potential customers.

Needless to say, there are various techniques (or, should we say technologies) available to optimize the search result so that to get higher ranking. Obviously, some of them will ethical and some of them will be not. Just like white and black - simple (No racism!)

Marketers often face a choice when outlining their marketing strategy, specifically when it comes to generating traffic through links - they must choose between white hat or black hat link building strategies to elevate their content marketing efforts.

In the simplest form, white hat tactics emphasize a strategy that follows Google’s rules – particularly in terms of quality content, whereas, Black hat tactics take a complete 180, opting for a more aggressive approach that isn’t afraid to bend the rules.

There is a very well articulated comparison chart provided by diffen.com, which goes as follows:


Contents: Black Hat SEO vs. White Hat SEO

1. Features and Techniques Used



As already mentioned, Black hat SEO techniques usually include unethical characteristics violating search engine rules and regulations, create poor user experience, unethically present content in different visual and non-visual ways to search engine spiders and human users. Some of the most common Black Hat SEO techniques include:


  • Spamdexing - which is the practice of repeating unrelated phrases to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine
  • Keyword Stuffing – this includes packing long lists of keywords without proper formation
  • Invisible Text – this is the placing of keywords in white text on a white background in order to attract search engine spiders
  • Doorway Pages – this is a fake page that user never gets to see. This is constructed only for search engine spiders so as to trick them into indexing the site higher 
  • Invisible iFrames – the page visible to user need not belong to company hosting the webpage. These are used to download software on to user’s computer in background without user’s knowledge


On a contrary, White Hat SEO is creating content for users and not search engines. Its main aim is to promote accessibility. White hat SEO not only follows all SEO guidelines but ensures that all content indexed by search engines is the same as the content that a human user will see. It focuses on readability, relevance of content, well-structured and well-written content that will be useful to people who read it.


2. Effectiveness

SEO is part science, part art. There is a broad range of opinion in the SEO practitioner community regarding the effectiveness of white hat vs black hat techniques. But, this needs no expert mind to say that white hat techniques take longer time to improve search rankings.

3. Consequences

Even though quick results make black hat SEO tempting, it can get your site banned (de-indexed) or heavily penalized for use of unethical practices. Moreover black hat SEO methods give only short term results. White hat SEO can get your site ranked higher by use of ethical techniques, good content, appropriate keywords and a combination of smart marketing angles providing long lasting results.

Eventually Google caught on and tackled black hat practices by publishing Google Penguin, an update to the search results ranking algorithm Google Panda. From then on, a website would be penalized by Google when using black hat tactics.

Google Panda

Google's Panda update rewards websites that have high-quality content. After this algorithm update, low-quality pages on the site affected not just the ranking for those pages but for the entire website.

Google Penguin

Google's Penguin update was targeted specifically at black hat SEO techniques using which some website owners had accumulated thousands of links from "link farms". Thousands of such websites were penalized due to the Penguin update. Webmasters were encouraged to remove bad links pointing to their site. In some cases, they were able to do so successfully but often webmasters cannot control who links to them.

With such regulatory measures taken by Google, there is another array of techniques being widely used now-a-days, which is to some extent, a hybrid of the previous two categories.

Grey Hat SEO

It is SEO practice that remains “ill-defined” and/or “ill-advised” by search engine published guidelines and which can be disagreeable. In essence, it’s Black masquerading as White. For example, click bait. Click bait refers to a practice where someone posts something like an eye catching link or piece of content that encourages a reader to click and read more.



References:

  • https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
  • https://www.searchenginejournal.com/white-vs-black-hat-seo-what-is-the-difference/183088/
  • http://www.diffen.com/difference/Black_Hat_SEO_vs_White_Hat_SEO
  • https://www.singlegrain.com/blog-posts/search-engine-optimization/rank-using-black-hat-seo-tactics-white-hat-way/
  • https://www.verticalrail.com/kb/white-black-grey-hat-seo/



Comments

  1. Unknown28 October 2017 at 04:32

    A really good read, very informative. Looking forward to more such posts! :)

    ReplyDelete

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