SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve.

These methods is classified as:

White Hat (Ethical or Natural)SEO
  • White hats tend to produce results that last a long time.
  • An SEO technique is considered white hat (ethical practice) if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. White hat SEO tricks is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
  • White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose.

Black Hat (Unethical or Un-natural) SEO
  • Black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.
  • Black hat SEO i.e Unethical Practice attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review.

Infamous examples are:
The February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices and the April 2006 removal of the PPC Agency bigMouthMedia.
All three companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.

Always focus on white hat i.e ethical search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, for better visibility in search engines. NEVER try Black Hat techniques in attempt to improve fast ranking in Search Engines

Recommended Reading:
SEO basics

3 comments:

  1. Shamindra-Freelance SEO6/30/2009

    Sure, black hat tactics is very harmful to site....one must prefer for white hat tactics..in SEO.
    Good blog...
    I also advice site owner to never prefer black hat approach for seo.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Amit Sen7/01/2009

    Black hat techniques not only fools search engine but also to users.
    When you search for something and see the search result and when you click that link it direct you to another sites...whats use of such practice.
    Really black hat seo technique is really bad.
    Always webmaster or SEO must only follow natural SEO technique.
    Good blog with very useful information.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Carter1/09/2010

    You must always follow White Hat Seo, following black hat techniques you will invite search engines to block your site
    Thank you for sharing it..

    ReplyDelete