White hat vs Black hat

The battle for online visibility is heating up by the day, thanks to the rate at which online businesses are coming up. For marketers, any method is worth trying so long as it promises to drive traffic to the landing page. That has led to the emergence of unethical methods of getting high search engine rankings and back links. This is what is referred to as black hat SEO. On the other hand, there are the ethical methods of acquiring links and online visibility that is generally referred to as white hat SEO. Black hat involves a wide variety of practices such as buying of links, keyword spamming, link spamming, robot posting and other design based skills. Most search engines are made to resist black hat tricks. Pagers and content that has the characteristics of black hat will normally be black listed and sometimes even banned by search engines. In the recent past, search engines like Google have tightened their guidelines to deal with back hat skills.

The strict observance of rules and guidelines in white hat SEO are not easy to follow and that may be one of the reasons black hat has gained so much popularity. It also takes quite a while to realize results in form of traffic or search engine rankings when using white hat skills especially when competing with the black hats. Getting a high Page rank or traffic from white hat skills are very rewarding in the long run. The links and ranking once achieved can last for a long time. In addition, it is also free. Black hat skills on the other hand are expensive and can only be effective for a short time. Most efforts will in a short time be nullified through banning of such a site from search engine results. It is therefore not worth investing time and skills in Black hat skills.

One of the reasons people consider black hat is the power that it is said to have in shattering search engine barriers. Some people will pay top dollar to get ranked in this way without really considering the consequences. Modern internet marketing methods have also contributed to the rise of black hat. It is common practice today for people to create single page sites also known as mini sites to target a specific market niche for a short period of time. With black hat, such marketers are able to push the mini site or page through search engines. The way forward is in the hands of search engine code masters who need to strengthen their engines to deal with black hat skills and strengthen the use of white hat SEO skills.