| An SEO
technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the
search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As
the search engine guidelines
are not written as a series of rules or
commandments, this is an important distinction to note.
White hat SEO 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.
Black hat SEO 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. |