When it comes to optimizing a website for search engines (and mainly for Google), it's possible to use a very large number of different techniques.
However, you should distinguish White Hat SEO techniques, which follow Google's rules, from Black Hat SEO techniques, which do not, and from Grey Hat SEO techniques that skirt the rules.
In this article, we present the main White Hat and Grey Hat techniques you can implement to boost your website in search engine results.
Then we'll look in more detail at what Black Hat SEO is, who practices it, and the main techniques used. Not to be used to try to place web pages in Google's top results as quickly as possible, Black Hat SEO puts into practice SEO techniques that are strongly condemned by the search giant.
White Hat SEO for natural optimization of your website
When you're running a web project, it's natural to want to do everything possible to get a website well positioned quickly.
Among the techniques to implement, you can use those called "White Hat", which ensure you won't suffer penalties and also optimize your website in a natural way.
They are therefore very useful for pursuing a long-term strategy, sustainably building a brand's or company's online reputation, and providing an optimal user experience.
The main White Hat SEO techniques are:
- Guest blogging (guest article writing)It involves writing articles intended to be published on sites covering the same topic as yours and allows you to gain high-quality inbound links.
- Creating quality content. SEO experts hammer it home: content quality comes first. So, whatever the topic and whatever the format of the content you produce, make sure it always provides added value to the user.
- Link baiting (viral content creation) To drive traffic to your website, aiming for viral content can be a good idea. Be careful though: exclusive information, sensationalism, or controversy are often among the ingredients used…
- Internal linking. To help search engines better understand your website, consider building a genuine network of your pages using links. This way, Google and the like will better grasp how your site’s pages are connected.
- On-page optimization. It consists of technical, structural, and content adjustments.
Grey Hat SEO: how to boost a website's rankings
Because simply using White Hat SEO techniques isn't enough to achieve good rankings quickly, some project owners hesitate to step a little outside the lines.
Without, however, using techniques that go against Google's recommendations — the Black Hat SEO —, they resort to practices that flirt with the limits of what the famous search engine recommends.
For information, you should know that the main Grey Hat SEO techniques are the following:
- Building link circuits. To generate traffic, links are still popular, but to avoid the trap of reciprocal exchanges, some people build “link circuits.” The idea is simple: site 1 links to site 2, site 2 links to site 3, and site 3 links back to site 1. Not much to Google’s liking…
- Content spinning. It involves generating alternative versions of an original text, in large numbers. Very trendy in the early 2010s, this technique has lost its appeal as more emphasis has been placed on content quality.
- Registering old or recently expired domain names. Some web project creators do not hesitate to buy large numbers of domain names that have useful authority and pages with links. They then replace the links so they point to the pages of the sites they want to rank in search engines.
- The Google bomb (or Google bombing). This technique relies on a characteristic of PageRank which gives weight to the text that contains a hyperlink to a page, useful for making that page appear in Google results for the query matching the link text.
Although it is essential to implement best practices SEO White Hat as part of your website's SEO strategy, you must consider whether you are willing to bend the ethical rules set by Google.
Indeed, Grey Hat SEO practices can buy you some time to reach the top of search engine results pages. But using them can also cost you dearly if you're flagged by a Google specialist.
So it's up to you to decide which SEO approach you want to adopt based on your risk tolerance...
Black Hat SEO: beware of the risks!
As the name suggests, the Black Hat SEO is an organic SEO strategy aimed at ranking a web page well "without complying with search engines' standards and guidelines". It is opposed to White Hat SEO as well as Grey Hat SEO.
In practice, Black Hat SEO involves over-optimizing a web page to rank it quickly among the top search engine results.
Be careful, however: if Google detects the use of Black Hat SEO techniques, the penalty can be severe for the affected website. The search engine can indeed downgrade it or even deindex it. So it's often better not to play with fire!
In which situations is Black Hat SEO used?
It is very rare for companies to use Black Hat SEO specialists to rank brochure sites because many prefer not to expose themselves to a risk of deindexing that can be disastrous for their business.
On the other hand, the SEO techniques Black Hat practitioners are popular for ranking websites destined to disappear and that can serve as landing pages to collect as much data as possible.
It must be said that in this specific situation, the goal is truly to obtain a good ranking extremely quickly in order to collect as much data as possible. As for the risk taken, it matters little given that the sites in question are destined to disappear. In other words, a downgrade or deindexing would not be catastrophic.
Black Hat SEO is also used by some unscrupulous companies to secure a good ranking without, however, monopolizing the top spots in the listings.
Most often, the intent is to take advantage of good visibility without customers being able to access pages where negative reviews are numerous. A balance to be struck, all things considered…
What are the main Black Hat SEO techniques?
The arsenal available to Black Hat SEO practitioners is particularly large.
So, here is a non-exhaustive list of techniques they can put into practice:
- The cloaking. It is a technique that involves configuring a web server to present different page content depending on whether the visitor is a bot or a human user. For bots, pages are often over-optimized, while for visitors they may show prohibited content (including pornographic videos, among other things).
- Hidden content. SEO specialists will hide textual content behind an image, in a color identical to the background, or in a font size of 0 so that only bots can read it.
- Keyword stuffing (or keyword stuffing in French). This is a technique that involves placing keywords in hot zones even when they are not necessarily relevant.
- Scraping. It consists of extracting content from other sites and reusing it to create pages easily.
- Link farms. To artificially increase a website's importance, it is possible to create several websites that link to each other. These sites can rely on recently expired domain names so the links have more "juice."
- The text spinning. When you abuse this type of content, you are using a Black Hat SEO technique. It involves mass-generating alternative versions of an original text by writing multiple options for each phrase segment. Originating from very low-quality content, content spinning enables keyword over-optimization.
- Buying links in bulk in order to artificially boost a website's importance
- Spamming. It involves the automated insertion of incoherent links, both in forum comments and on blogs.
Other techniques exist, but you already have a complete picture of those most frequently used by experts in Black Hat SEO.
Our advice
As you understand, Black Hat SEO is the “illegal” solution for quickly positioning a website in Google’s search results.
So, we we strongly advise against resorting to it and we invite you instead to turn to SEO specialists White Hat who will boost your website's visibility over the weeks, and do so without any risk of demotion or deindexing.
For your SEO, the best solution is to entrust content writing to professional web copywriters !
