SEO can be classified into two main categories namely Black and white SEO. Both the techniques are used for improving website search engine rankings, but focuses on different aspects which can bring overall improvement in website ranking.
Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO focusses only on Search engines while not keeping much focus on human audience. It is used typically by those who are looking for better returns on their sites and does not wants a long term investment. Techniques used in Black Hat SEO include link farming, hidden text, links, blog content, Spamming and keyword stuffing. These are techniques that search engines never approve and minimize the effect of Search engines. Black Hat SEO is often known as spamdexing.
Features of Black Hat
Black Hat SEO or spamdexing has below significant features.
- Attempts to improve page ranking and involves deception
- It is a disapproved and a non-recommended method by most search engines, as it does not builds human friendly information but strictly aims at improving web traffic.
- It is known as clocking SEO tactic, wherein one version of the webpage is served to search engine bots/ spiders while other version is kept for human visitors
- Metatag stuffing and keyword stuffing is performed by repeating keywords not related to web content
- Low quality web pages with repeated content are created with little information and more stuffing of phrases or keywords or links.
- Uses invisible text or hidden content with background color or small sized font to hide them under the HTML codes.
- Focuses on creation of mirror websites with conceptually same content but various different URL targeting to increase web traffic rather than providing quality content online.
- A rogue copy of an original website is created to redirect web traffic to unrelated sites, which is also known as page hijacking.
White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO on the other hand uses different strategies and techniques targeted mainly at capturing human audience compared to search engines. The techniques performed under White SEO forms part of the recommended quality design of most search engines. Some of the strategies involved are keyword analysis, doing research, meta-tags, back links, link building and other approaches favorable to make the content more human readable. Those who work in White SEO expect long term investment from their websites as results from White SEO last for a longer time.
Features of White SEO
It is an SEO tactics that conforms to below mentioned features
- Ensures that the content is properly marked as per search engine guidelines
- Proper search engine indexing is performed
- Ensure that web page content is made for users and not just for search engines.
- No deception involved
- Quality and availability of web-pages is maintained.
- It is one of the recommended SEO design tactics made especially to provide quality content to the visitors.
Conclusion
If you are looking to improve your page rank then it is better to stay away from Black Hat SEO and instead choose White hat SEO. The search engines are continuously improving and can identify websites designed with Black Hat SEO, hence it is advisable to opt to correct methods of optimization and chose White hat SEO which can provide long term benefits both to the owner and visitor.
