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March 19, 2021
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Marketing Digital
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a practice that encompasses a variety of techniques and concepts. Some of these techniques are classified as “good” and “bad” depending on their intentions and whether or not they comply with the standards set by search engines.
Good SEO techniques are classified as White Hat and bad ones as Black Hat. The use of the term “Hat” has its origins in Western movies, where the villains wear black hats and the heroes wear white hats.
Below, we will explain what these techniques consist of, which, subject to an ethical duality, you should implement or avoid, as the case may be. Let's get started!
What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO refers to actions that aim to deceive and persuade search engines to speed up the positioning process , as it usually takes time. For these reasons, they are considered unethical and are penalized.
Google, for example, has established quality guidelines that every developer, web designer and writer must follow if they want their website to rank high. Failure to do so can result in the website being “punished” by having its site removed from the search engine.
Those who perform Black Hat SEO techniques are known as hackers. They are people who violate search engine guidelines, implement manipulative tactics through code, and focus on making a quick profit, regardless of the implications.
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Black Hat SEO Practices
Concealment
Also known as cloaking, it is the action of directing search engines to a different page than the one shown to users.
Spamming keywords
It consists of unnecessarily repeating a keyword in the texts of a web page in order to position it.
Use of hidden texts
This involves adjusting the color of the letters in a text to match the background of the page. This way, users will not be able to read it, but search engines will. With this technique, people repeat keywords artificially and the user does not notice.
Link exchange/sale
It is a bad link building practice within off-page SEO that consists of asking other websites for money or something in exchange for linking to yours.
Content plagiarism
Plagiarism is an action that is rejected in many contexts, not only within web writing. It involves sharing information that is exactly the same as that which is present on another website.
It consists of commenting on forums and blogs with links from your website without being requested and without any kind of context.
Participation in link farms
Known in English as link farms, they are websites that are created with the purpose of massively linking to other websites, with the aim of increasing their Page Rank.
What is White Hat SEO?
White Hat SEO is the implementation of positioning actions that are in line with the quality guidelines of search engines and, in essence, are the SEO recommendations that you should ALWAYS follow.
As you may have noticed, being on the dark side of SEO has consequences. So, to ensure that your website's ranking is authentic and your website is not penalized, you must follow the following practices:
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White Hat SEO Practices
Creating quality content
In SEO, quality content is content that has original ideas and reflections, provides accurate information, cites references, adheres to a defined style, and is easy to understand.
Meta tag optimization
Meta tags are HTML codes that are present in the internal structure of a web page. They are used to tell search engines what information they should index and what actions they should take regarding a web page.
Its optimization is important because if a person searches Google for a poland number for whatsapp keyword related to something and that word is present within the meta tags, it is more likely that that page will appear above another.
You may also be interested in: meta tags in SEO: what they are and what they are for
Focus efforts on ensuring a good user experience
A website must stand out for its design and ease of use, that is, it must have an interface that is manageable and understandable by its users. This guarantees a good experience.
These aspects become important criteria that search engines use to rank web pages in their results: if a visitor's user experience is good, they will stay browsing and click on the same site again the next time they see it in the results.
Building quality internal links
Just as there are good and bad SEO practices, there are also good and bad link building practices. This means that everything that has to do with link building is not necessarily bad.
A website can have several pages linked together (inbound links), as long as the intention is to cite a reference or content that may continue to arouse the user's interest. This practice also helps positioning; the same occurs if other websites link to yours due to the quality of their content.
Broken and duplicate link checker
There are platforms like Google Search Console that allow you to check if there are any broken or duplicate links within a website that affect SEO and that, in the eyes of search engines, may be seen as deceptive practices.
We invite you to read also: Google Search Console: What is it, what is it for and how does it work?
Prevent and eliminate user-generated spam on your site
There are people who often comment on web articles with links to drive traffic to a website that has deceptive intentions behind it. We recommend that you delete such comments, as they can affect your reputation if there are any links that are part of a farm among those links.
Is there a Gray Hat?
Yes! Like everything in life, things are neither black nor white, but there are nuances.
The middle ground between both techniques is Gray Hat: these are actions that may be deceptive and unethical, but that Google, or another search engine, has not yet identified as such (yet).
While this makes them less risky than Black Hat SEO tactics, they do have potential consequences and should therefore be avoided as well.
One of the most well-known Gray Hat practices is using synonyms and “spinning” texts so that they do not look exactly like plagiarism.
Ultimately, the difference between both SEO techniques is that white hat (black hat) techniques follow the search engine guidelines and improve the user experience, while black hat (black hat) techniques break them.