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

White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO: Which One to Choose?

SEO techniques and strategies are primarily divided into two broad categories: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. SEO specialists recommend using the White Hat SEO tactics over Black Hat SEO, and the reasons for this are many. Let’s study what the differences between the both are.

What is White Hat SEO?

White Hat SEO techniques refer to the tools and strategies that are designed while keeping in mind the human user who will visit the website, rather than designed just to get a high ranking by a search engine. These techniques include usage of keywords, keyword analysis, rewriting metatags relevant to the website, link building, backlinks, and writing researched content that provides value to the human visitors. SEO specialists recommend using White Hat techniques to make long-term investments on the website and get a higher ranking over time that lasts for a long time.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO techniques refer to tools and strategies used to get a higher ranking by breaking or devising a workaround the search engine rules. In the Black hat SEO, the focus is solely on getting a higher rank at the cost of not providing value to the human visitors. These tools are used for quick unstable return on the website, rather than a long-term investment. These techniques include keyword stuffing, link farming, hidden texts and links, and blog content spamming. Since the Black Hat SEO breaks the set guidelines of the search engine, its consequences include being banned and/or de-indexed as penalisation for practising unethical techniques.

To understand the differences further, let’s compare both categories in pointwise.

Compare and Differences: White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO

White Hat SEO

1. The techniques used comply with the search engine’s guidelines to improve website’s ranking.
2. Following the rules, the website is prevented from penalisation or being de-indexed.
3. The goal is to provide valuable content to the visitors.
4. It is used for stable long-term investments in the website.
5. Keywords in the title, metatags and body of content are used optimally.

Black Hat SEO

1. The techniques bypass the guidelines of a search engine to improve a website’s ranking.
2. Will most likely get your website banned, de-indexed or penalised by the search engine.
3. The goal is getting a good rank, not providing value to the visitors.
4. Used for quick financial return at the cost of instability of the website.
5. Keyword density is intentionally higher to get a better ranking.

Conclusion

The primary difference between these both SEO techniques is that White Hat SEO follows the Google’s guidelines and improves the user experience; whereas Black Hat SEO violates those guidelines and is done at cost of bad human visitor experience.