What Is the Difference Between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO?

John Warren August 13, 2021August 13, 2021

In business, you are always driven to get ahead of the competition. In current times, that requires ranking high in search engine results to drive traffic to your site and convert clicks into customers. If your search engine optimization (SEO) is lacking, it can greatly hurt your bottom line.

The drive to succeed can push you to take shortcuts when it comes to your SEO, but most of these little tricks are banned by top search engines. This is what divides all SEO techniques into two categories: white hat SEO (the good stuff) and black hat SEO (the tricks to avoid).

White Hat vs. Black Hat: What’s the Difference?

In SEO, Google is king. While there are other search engines that all have their own algorithms and policies, the giant is Google, and that means their policies matter most.

White hat SEO refers to techniques that are approved by Google—or at the very least, not penalized by it. While this approval can vary across search engines, most fall in line with whatever Google does. This means that white hat SEO should keep you above board no matter how customers seek you out.

Black hat SEO is the exact opposite. It encompasses techniques that violate the terms and conditions outlined by Google and other search engines. With black hat SEO, it is all about tricks meant to manipulate the algorithm to land higher in results without offer the quality that Google and your audience want. Even when they work for a few days or weeks, they result in your website being blacklisted in the long term.

Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO
Black Hat Techniques	White Hat Techniques
Populating the website with high-quality, interesting, and informative content Focusing on on-page SEO elements including meta descriptions, titles, and tags and quality links and keywords Getting quality backlinks from reputable and relevant sites Improving technical aspects like loading speed, mobile functionality, and indexing	Plagiarizing content from other websites or copying and pasting directly Using negative SEO techniques that are meant to lower the ranking of competitors rather than raise yours Stuffing keywords into your content even when they do not logically flow Using gateway pages and cloaking techniques

If your search engine optimization in Atlanta is lacking, now is the time to improve. Want to embrace SEO best practices? Take a look at the top three search engine optimization trends of 2020.

More interested in gaining an understanding of SEO? Try Search Engine Optimization Ranking Factors: Explained.