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What colour is your hat

POSTED 26th June 09, by Dan Williams.

White Hat or Black Hat

Search Engine Optimization techniques can be put into two areas for classification:

White Hat - these use techniques that search engines do approve of
Black Hat - these use techniques that search engines do not approve of

White Hat techniques

These tend to produce long term results, creating a site over time which conforms to the search engine's guidelines and involves no deception. However, White Hat is not just about following guidelines, but it is also about making sure that the content that the search engine sees is the same as the content the end user will see.
It is commonly said that White Hat is creating content for users not for search engines but also then making it easily accessible to the spiders of search engines rather than trying to trick search engines about your content.

Black Hat techniques

This attempts to improve your ranking via techniques that are frowned upon by the search engines such as Google, Ask and Yahoo. A common Black Hat technique uses text that is hidden either by using an invisible div or colouring large areas of text the same colour as the background onto which it sits.
Another method, called Cloaking, is when a different page is given, depending on whether the page is being viewed by a human user or a search engine.

The Penalties

There may be penalties that occur because of the use of Black Hat techniques. This is either by reducing their ranking or by completely eliminating their listing from the search engine's database. Such penalties can either be automatically enforced or via a manual site review.

An example of this was in 2006 when Google removed BMW Germany's site from their listings for the 'use of deceptive practices'. However, BMW quickly apologised, fixed the issues and were re-instated into Google's listings.

TAGS: BLACK HAT, SEO, WHITE HAT