White Hat vs. Black Hat

If you are considering employing the talents of search engine optimization services, there’s no doubt that you’ve conducted some research on the internet and come across the term ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ techniques. It may conjure up a mental image of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, but what does it mean when it comes to increasing your standing on search engine results pages?

As you’d expect, it refers to the tactics employed by SEO services. The white hat method can be generally though of as creating content for users, something that will keep a search engine’s web crawlers happy. Each search engine has it’s own set of unwritten guidelines, and one of these is to ensure that whatever meta tags are attached to your page are relevant to the content. Web crawlers employ algorithms that will index and rank your page depending on this content, and can determine where your site's page will rank for different terms.

On the other hand, black hat techniques are seen as a way to try and fool web crawlers, and are frowned upon by search engines. Some ruses involve trying to hide text on the page, by coloring it identically to the background or positioning it off screen. Another method, known as cloaking, recognizes if the page is being accessed by a human or a spider, and will direct each to different pages.

There are many more ways to fool a search engine, but as search engines get better at discovering black hat methods and take punitive measures on those guilty, you really do need to ask yourself if it is worth the risk.