Do you know that doing SEO the wrong way can get your website penalized? Hi everyone, this is Pradeep, and today I will share the difference between Black Hat and White Hat SEO. And the techniques you should avoid while doing SEO. The terms Black Hat and White Hat originate from the techniques and approaches we use to do SEO.
What is white hat SEO?
If you don’t violate the rules and guidelines of the search engine in order to rank higher. Or if you practice all the ethical techniques and maintain the integrity of your website, then it is White Hat SEO.
The white hat techniques are applied by keeping in mind the users. In this, we try to provide the best experience for our users. So, what all comes under White Hat SEO?
Basically, all the techniques which we have discussed in the article on On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Technical SEO are a part of White Hat SEO.
What is Black Hat SEO?
When opposite to white hat, if you are breaking the rules of the search engines. Or if you are trying to please the algorithm instead of users by violating the terms and conditions, it is Black Hat SEO. Here instead of focusing on the human audience, you are focusing on the algorithm.
5 Black Hat Techniques to Avoid
Black Hat SEO techniques All the unethical techniques you can think of comes under Black Hat SEO. So, here I will discuss 5 techniques that are part of Black Hat SEO and which you need to avoid at any cost.
Keyword Stuffing
If you are unnecessarily putting keywords here and there in your content, thereby making it difficult to read, then it is called keyword stuffing. For a healthy practice, we need to keep the keyword density within 1.5%. The Yoast SEO plugin can help you with that. You can also use synonyms of your focus keyword to make your content more readable.
Purchasing Links
We know that Backlinks play a very important role in the SEO of your website. But it doesn’t mean you should go on buying links for your website. If Google finds out that you are doing this, it will eventually hurt your website. Link Building should be natural. In short, any artificial attempt to improve your rankings in the search engines will have a negative impact in the long run.
Cloaking
It is the process where you show one thing to the search engines and another to the users. This way you are basically misdirecting the users.
An example,
- where you tell search engines that this page has HTML text. But instead of that, you are showing images to the users.
Wrongful redirection
Generally redirecting is a very useful technique where you send users to some other page in case you have moved your page or changed its URL. Basically, it is used to enhance the user experience. But sometimes people use it to send users to a totally irrelevant page.
Or redirect them to some spammy website. And then it is called wrongful redirection which is again a part of Black Hat SEO.
Hidden text
It is similar to cloaking. Here you make the color of the text the same as that of the background color of your page.
For example,
- if the background color of your page is white, then the text color is white or almost white. Another way of doing this is by making the text so small that it is almost impossible to read it or see it.
Why do people do Black Hat SEO?
You may be thinking that if Black Hatis bad, then why do people do it? It is because white hat SEO takes time and patience. And they are looking for a shortcut or a quick and fast way to rank their websites. People think that by doing this they will be able to cheat the search engines.
But believe me, Google is much much smarter than we think. If you are doing a black hat, you will eventually see its negative impacts. And as a consequence of practicing unethical techniques, you may end up getting your website banned or penalized. So, I will never recommend you to do BlackHat SEO.
