What is black hat SEO and white hat SEO?

The difference between black hat SEO and white hat SEO has to do with the techniques that businesses use to manipulate search results. Many strategies that were once considered white hat SEO strategies are now likely to get you on Google's bad side, which is why it's important to understand these differences.

What Defines White Hat SEO?

White hat SEO is all about quality content. Google and other search engines favor websites that have fresh, original content over websites that use duplicate or spun content. Many websites using black hat SEO techniques tend to use automated spinners to reword content from other sources to the point where it's nearly unreadable in many cases. Google is much more likely to punish websites that use those strategies.

Google also dislikes link spamming techniques, such as backlinks that appear on link spam websites or in comments on blogs that only exist to post a link. Many businesses still use these strategies to gain hundreds or even thousands of backlinks, but if a majority are of low quality, Google won't likely reward those efforts.

Put Effort into Content Creation

The best content is original text that naturally incorporates short- and long-tail keywords within, with high-quality links and optimized images. You should also write and publish content regularly, because the more content your website has, the more Google will view your website as a reliable authority that's worth ranking.

As Google continues to improve, more and more black hat SEO techniques are becoming punishable,