Are you trying to make your search engine optimization better? Well, in order to do that, you need to know some SEO techniques. You cannot dive into the online world without knowing a lot about it. This is why we decided to help you get to know just how you can make your website much better. Having a website isn’t just about making it look nice. This is a very complex thing to deal with. If you have a website for your business or even just for fun, your goal is for it to rank highly so that people are able to find it easily. As already mentioned, you need to know about some techniques which is why we are here to tell you about the difference between black hats and GREY hats.
What are SEO techniques?
Some might not have heard of the term SEO techniques. This is basically what it is that you do to make your SEO better or worse. There are plenty of techniques that can help a website out and new ones appear all the time as the world of online develops constantly. But doing some things can make your SEO bad which ends up marking your website as unreliable to the search engine.
This is why when you have a website you also need to have someone professional handling it and keeping it up to date. SEO experts are discovering new ways to make your website easier to find all the time which for a lot of website owners is a very important thing.
As new techniques appear all the time, it can be hard for you to keep up with them. Not all of them are good ones to use, though. And sometimes even if the technique is good, using it in a large amount can break your optimization. You have to remember that moderation is the key to success when it comes to SEO. And as SEO experts, we know what are the things you certainly shouldn’t be doing.
What is a black hat SEO technique?
Let us start by telling you more about the black hat SEO technique. This is actually a practice that goes against search engine optimization guidelines. The black hat technique practice is overusing one of the techniques that generally help you rank higher in results.
A lot of people try to cheat the system by keyword stuffing, using private link networks, adding invisible text or white fonting, cloaking, and even adding unrelated keywords. To the search engine, this is considered cheating as these are things that can help your website out but not in the right way.
Gaining search visibility through unscrupulous practices marks your website as an unreliable one and if you are doing this and it gets noticed, you could suffer serious penalties which can be hard to recover from. Using black hats can have much more of a bad impact than a good one even though doing some of these things could help your ranking. We believe that it is always best to go according to the rules.
Here are some black hat techniques you should not be using:
- duplicated content – it is better to have fewer original content rather than more of it but duplicated;
- keyword stuffing – make sure you have a natural keyword use on your website to rank highly;
- misleading redirects
- negative SEO – trying to sabotage another website by including too many of its links hoping it will get penalized;
- hidden text.
What are GREY hats?
GREY hat techniques are similar but in fact different from black hats. GREY is a mix of using white hat techniques and black hats. We haven’t mentioned white hats until now which is why we will explain what they are in case you do not know about them either. White hats are the techniques that you should be using, the good ones. The ones that you will not get penalized for using. They certainly only have a positive effect on your search engine optimization.
So, black ones are bad techniques and white ones are the good ones. This means that GREY hat is a mix of the two which means using both the good and the bad techniques. Is this a good idea though? Using the techniques that you should be using and adding a little bit of the black ones?
Well, certainly not. Even though it is considered to be using a GREY hat technique, you still are using black hat ones. Which automatically means a possibility to get penalized for doing so.
What is the difference between black hats and grey hats then?
If using mostly white hat techniques and a couple of black hat ones it means that you are using grey hat techniques. So what is the difference between black hats and GREY hats then? Well, if using only the techniques that are considered black, you can end up with a much worse penalty than if you were to use a mix of white and black hats. So, the difference between black hats and grey hats is in the penalty that you get.
Some examples of grey hat techniques are:
- using expired domains or broken link building
- using private blog networks (PBNs)
- spinning existing content
- hidden text
- keyword stuffing.
To conclude. When it comes to the difference between black hats and GREY hats, it is best to stick to the rules and use only the white hat techniques. This way you will not have to worry about penalties.