As SEO experts, we always say traffic matters, but integrity matters more. If you are someone who has been around the term “ SEO “ then you might have been aware of the buzzwords that are thrown around, like white hat and black hat. Beyond the marketing terminology, they directly affect your long-term SEO health.
White hat SEO is a technique that focuses on readers first and content. This is a type of information that is built around users only. When you include visuals, break down complex terms into user-friendly language, and always provide clearer answers. Then you are telling the search engine to discover the page and understand it. White hat SEO is built around a simple formula: earn your links by writing useful content.
Black hat SEO is a tactic that is done for quick website wins. Perform keyword stuffing, earn spammy backlinks irrelevant to your niche, and make sure the content is written for search bots and not for the user. Once Google catches you doing that, most of your visibility would be removed from Google, and you would witness website damage, which can be detrimental to your reputation
White hat vs black hat link building: key differences
The key differences ultimately boil down to two goals: lifespan and safety. White hat link building professionals focus on readers’ content and building authority over time. In black hat, the focus is more on winning the SEO game and topping search results through manipulative tactics. Over time, black hat professionals face lost revenue and Google penalties.
White hat vs black hat link building: Common ways to do it
Let’s go one by one so that you understand what we are trying to say. First, we will focus on white hat link building and gradually shift the focus to black hat link building.
White hat link building practices
White hat practices follow certain methods, and they are stated as follows
1. Writing content that earns backlinks. We are talking about natural backlinks where the publishers or the journalists genuinely find your content useful and cite your website. You don’t have to contact the owner to place your link, nor pay heavy charges in digital PR. Your site gets the link since it deserves it.
2. The interlink game: This is a technique that helps search engines understand the relationship between pages. For instance, if you are writing an article on 10 top SEO tools, you can interlink articles that are built around technical SEO, SEO basics, keyword research, and so on. Please note not to use oversaturated anchor text in each article; it should be different.
3. Take your page seriously: Once you are done with your content, the next step is to provide clear signals that would help Google understand your page. Start by providing page titles, then move on to H1, H2, and H3 titles that make sense. Then move on to meta descriptions and descriptive URLS, and then finally end with easy-to-scan paragraphs and a CTA.
4. Go for natural placement: Anytime you stuff keywords, you are telling Google that it is manipulated. No sane person would place keywords abruptly just to increase the keyword density. Where you feel that it sits naturally, incorporate it.
5. Page experience: The development team should ensure it works smoothly on mobile and on desktop. A user must find what they are looking for and should not struggle to understand your webpage. 404 errors, server errors, and broken link errors should be fixed.
Black hat link building services
Black hat practices follow certain methods, and they are stated as follows
1. Keyword stuffing and cloaking
Professionals using black hat SEO techniques make sure that keyword stuffing is done with intent. For instance a professional writing a location page for Oregon, USA, might use the best website company Oregon multiple times, commonly called keyword stuffing.
Cloaking, on the other hand, presents users with content that is just done to fill the page and not to satisfy the user. For example, if you are writing “ How to learn coding in 24 hours,” instead of giving the solution, you write about why coding is needed, what the current salary of coders is, and so on. Do you see the manipulation here?
2. Links and Hidden Text
Link spam is done when you do internal linking to a page that is not relevant to the topic or make users go to another link that doesn’t involve your niche. Also, if backlinks are passed only through paid linking and link exchanges, then that would come under spam too. Hidden text is information that is hidden from users and is only done to manipulate search engines
3. Scraped content
Content scraping is a technique where the writer doesn’t want to find gaps and provide value to the user. It just resurfaces the top pages of Google and rewrites content based on that. Copying content and changing a few words doesn’t make content original. This falls under Google’s spam policy.
4. Content abuse
When large numbers of low-value pages are created just to manipulate search engine rankings, they are known as scaled content abuse. It doesn’t matter if the pages were created with human intervention. Creating pages with AI doesn’t make the content spam, but creating it without any value does.
5. Reputation Abuse
Reputation abuse happens when bloggers, journalists, and everyone who once worked for you keeps distancing themselves from you since you have triggered Google penalties. They no longer want to get associated with you since you have used manipulative ways to rank higher. Once the trust is broken, the rest is all downhill from there.
6. Blog commenting
This is a technique used by black hat professionals in which they randomly put their link on blog posts to pass their link juice. The comment section is filled with these comments, and it’s very annoying. If you have ever operated a website. Then you know what we are talking about. Thanks to CleanTalk, a WordPress plugin, we don’t have to worry about these spammy activities or keep removing spam manually.
How to tackle Penalization if your site suffers a hit?
Look! If you have done black hat link building, the recovery is tough; we ain’t gonna lie. The recovery would take time and would include the following workflows
- The first thing you need to do is run a complete backlink audit on your site using Google Search Console and any third-party tool
- Contact any webmasters that have linked your site and spammed it
- Make disavow files for the links you cannot remove
- Creating a manual reconsideration request; rebuild through high-quality backlinks again
How to build links moving forward
- The best way to do this is to make sure the build is organic. The quickest way to do it is to make one in-depth article per month. This could be any topic from your area of expertise. Make sure the content is built only for the user and satisfies their search intent. Include visuals, data, and sources so that your content becomes link-worthy.
- Make sure that you develop a dedicated outreach plan and don’t treat it as a one-time project. Take outreach seriously
- Diversification is your key. Always use a mix of guest posts, directory citations, and PR mentions
- Don’t oversaturate your anchor text. Build it around the content and limit the use of using the exact keywords as clickable links
White hat vs black hat link building: The Final Call
In the end, it was always about getting noticed; both white hat and black hat have the same end goal. To be honest, we believe that Black hat is only used to “ hack the system,” while white hat is only used “ to provide value for the user”.
If you look at the history of Google, you would get to see that Black hat thrived in the beginning, but after the release of Google Panda and Google Penguin, most of the black hat techniques have now become irrelevant. If you are impressed by our knowledge and want to contact us for ethical link building, we are one step away.
