What difference of White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO

As with any industry as large as SEO, you’ll come across many different opinions about the most effective ways to approach site optimization and though many of these tactics can work, and the idea of which is “best” is largely subjective, there’s one distinction you need to be aware of: What Difference of White hat vs. black hat SEO.

While some SEOs might paint these as two different schools of thought, they’re not so much equal categorizations as a right and a wrong way to do SEO. So in this page, we’ll get into the differences between white hat and black hat SEO, as well as the strategies involved in each, and a few white hat SEO examples.

First, let’s start by answering the most common questions people have about white hat vs. black hat SEO.

What Is White Hat SEO?

White hat SEO, also known simply as SEO, is using search engine optimization techniques Google approves of. White hat SEO includes:

1. Making your site easy to navigate

2. Speeding up your page load times

3. Keyword research and using keywords to optimize your content

4. Attracting backlinks from high-quality websites

You can check out our list of the most important SEO ranking factors to see how Google decides to rank your content. White hat SEO:

1. Focuses on people first, and search engines second.

2. Takes a long term approach to optimization.

White hat SEO techniques carry no risk of being penalized by Google. We’ll explain more about Google penalties later in this guide.

What Is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO is essentially the exact opposite of white hat SEO. If a tactic meets the following criteria, it can be classified as a black hat.

1. It violates search engine guidelines

Black hat tactics violate Google’s guidelines, and in many cases, are directly referenced in these guidelines as practices you shouldn’t use.

2. It relies on manipulative tactics

While white hat SEO involves looking for ways to improve user experience, the black hat SEO relies on manipulating Google’s algorithm to improve rankings.

To put it simply, if a tactic is designed to make Google think that a site provides more value to users than it really does, it’s deceptive — and it’s black hat SEO.

3. It focuses on “quick wins”

Many of the strategies involved in black hat SEO are focused on exploiting loopholes in Google’s algorithm that can lead to improvements in rankings without much work and while some of these tactics can produce results, they’re almost always short-lived.

That’s because Google is constantly improving its algorithm to provide the best results to searchers, and to prevent site owners who don’t provide a great site experience from ranking well. This means that sites using black hat strategies are at risk for losing their rankings every time there’s a new algorithm update — making this a much more short-term approach than white hat SEO.

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

The biggest differences between these two approaches are that white hat SEO follows Google’s guidelines and improves user experience, while black hat SEO violates those guidelines and is typically done with complete disregard for human users.