Black Hat White Hat Grey Hat SEO Technniques

Lynne Level 1

July 18, 2016, 1:19 pm

Write the reason you're deleting this FAQ

So we're all aware of white hat and black hat techniques before I'm sure... but what about what people refer to as grey hat techniques?

I've heard a few internet marketers saying that it is not just black and white, there is not always a clear line between the two and something online marketers use what they call grey hat techniques.

What would be good examples of this and do you believe it is just black and white or are there various shades of grey in between?

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TommyCarey

I think a lot of people who use software to automate their SEO campaigns are the ones who came up with "Grey Hat" because we were considered black hatters lol

Automating your SEO campaigns by using software isn't really black hat, but people just starting out think of it as black hat because it doesn't take months to build the campaigns like it would if you were doing it manually.

Black hat SEO consists of these:

Hidden Text: This is when someone tries to put their keywords into the source code in a way that it will not visably show up on the page. This is an old technique and was quickly nerfed into oblivion. Anyone caught doing this will get a swift kick in the butt by Google, Yahoo! and Bing lol
Blended Text: This is similar to hidden text, but this is actually visible on the page... kind of. The text is blended into the background by making the text color the exact same as the background of the website. People would reduce the font size as small as they could and put in thousands of their keywords into a page in order to artificially rank in the search engines. The big 3 search engines quickly caught onto this and will burn your website to the ground in their search rankings if they catch you doing this
Keyword Stuffing: This goes with hidden text and blended text since they were usually used together. Keyword stuffing is when you add a bunch of your keywords to a page for the sole reason of ranking for that specific keyword. Doing this makes the page seem unreadable because every third word is your keyword. It doesn't look natural and that's what the search engines hate.
Doorway Pages: This is when people make pages solely to bring in traffic, but it's basically there to trick users to click through and in the end this will just mess your website up. If you're putting niche relevant content on a sub page, that's different since you're adding content related to your website and it's linked to your other pages.

These are just the main ones that have been really abused over the years. If you're doing any of these, you're a black hatter

I think a lot of people who use software to automate their SEO campaigns are the ones who came up with "Grey Hat" because we were considered black hatters lol :D Automating your SEO campaigns by using software isn't really black hat, but people just starting out think of it as black hat because it doesn't take months to build the campaigns like it would if you were doing it manually. [size=160][b]Black hat SEO consists of these:[/b][/size] [list][*][u][b]Hidden Text:[/b][/u] This is when someone tries to put their keywords into the source code in a way that it will not visably show up on the page. This is an old technique and was quickly nerfed into oblivion. Anyone caught doing this will get a swift kick in the butt by Google, Yahoo! and Bing lol :D[/*][*][u][b]Blended Text:[/b][/u] This is similar to hidden text, but this is actually visible on the page... kind of. The text is blended into the background by making the text color the exact same as the background of the website. People would reduce the font size as small as they could and put in thousands of their keywords into a page in order to artificially rank in the search engines. The big 3 search engines quickly caught onto this and will burn your website to the ground in their search rankings if they catch you doing this :D[/*][*][u][b]Keyword Stuffing:[/b][/u] This goes with hidden text and blended text since they were usually used together. Keyword stuffing is when you add a bunch of your keywords to a page for the sole reason of ranking for that specific keyword. Doing this makes the page seem unreadable because every third word is your keyword. It doesn't look natural and that's what the search engines hate.[/*][*][u][b]Doorway Pages:[/b][/u] This is when people make pages solely to bring in traffic, but it's basically there to trick users to click through and in the end this will just mess your website up. If you're putting niche relevant content on a sub page, that's different since you're adding content related to your website and it's linked to your other pages.[/*][/list] These are just the main ones that have been really abused over the years. If you're doing any of these, you're a black hatter :D

10 years ago