White hat or black hat?
-
There seems to be very differing opinions on what is good practice (white hat) and what is not (Black hat) and I'm not sure which way to lean (although my inclinations are slightly to the white). I'm starting a business offering a service and see ranking position 1-3 in the serps as my key to success. I'm creating good and useful content on my site and without much effort beyond on page seo have reached page 4 google for a few choice keywords. I feel that with a small number of links to a few of my pages i can reach page 1 and here is where my dilemma begins.
With a bit of investment in some software (£400-600 for 3 different products) I can start Tiered linkbuilding (in a black hat way) and get results quickly but potentially risking my site in the eyes of google.
I've been doing a little outreach to gain links in a whiter way but not had much success yet.
I'm keen to keep with the whiter side but see progress as slower.
Am I wrong? Can i build a robust link profile in a white hat way rapidly? Are there any quick wins i can gain to give me confidence? Why is white hat better than black hat?
All wisdom, experience, guidance and humour gratefully received.
-
Thanks both. Very useful and much appreciated.
-
This is quite the ants nest of a topic and you'll probably get some very strong opinions either way.
A simple overview of my take on it is this:
If you want fast rankings and you don't care how long they stick, go black hat. If you want long term rankings, take the time and invest the effort doing it with White Hat SEO.
While I'm not a black hat advocate by any means, to say that black hat doesn't work would be ignorant and it certainly does have its place. As an example, if you were selling a fad product (maybe yo-yos become super popular again for a few months!) then that's a perfect opportunity for black hat. The fad will likely only last for a few month so spending 6-12 months building a strong site would be misguided. The risks of black hat are also fine because you don't really care if you get penalised a few months down the track once sales have died off again. Granted, there is always a risk you'll be hit almost immediately but one very strong positive of black hat SEO is you can just go spin up a new domain and try again in a matter of hours.
On the other hand, if you're trying to build a sustainable business and rankings are expected to bring you business for the foreseeable future then, in my opinion, taking the black hat gamble is silly.
Our website is the perfect example of this. When we started the company the first page of results for our most competitive term were filled with sites using black hat SEO. Over the years they've all suffered the wrath of Penguin to some degree and sit on page 2+.
Rather than trying to copy their efforts, we went with the white hat approach and have been sitting in #1 for a couple of years now and don't expect that to change so long as we keep our site and link profile maintained.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Difference between White Hat/Black Hat?
Hey guys can you elaborate the difference between the White Hat and Black hat, White Hat: Getting Backlink form the relevant website that's look general and Anchor tag is also look natural. Black Hat: Getting a backlinks from different Niche like Unionwell from High DA website, and getting Link, I realize this is the difference but I need some confirmation may be I'm wrong because I'm newbie in SEO Link Building.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | saimkhanna0 -
Disappearing Links Black Hat ?
I have seen reports of Black hat spamming with dodgy links but we have another issue with a clients site. The site had a small number of solid following links about 60 which had been in place for years and in the past few weeks all but those directly under their control have ceased to link. At the same time a very aggressive competitor has entered their market which is owned by the officers of an SEO company. Could it be that they have somehow disavowed the links to the site to damage it how do we find out? there are now just 10 following links?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eff-Commerce0 -
Black Hat SEO Case Study - Private Link Network - How is this still working?
I have been studying my competitor's link building strategies and one guy (affiliate) in particular really caught my attention. He has been using a strategy that has been working really well for the past six months or so. How well? He owns about 80% of search results for highly competitive keywords, in multiple industries, that add up to about 200,000 searches per month in total. As far as I can tell it's a private link network. Using Ahref and Open Site Explorer, I found out that he owns 1000s of bought domains, all linking to his sites. Recently, all he's been doing is essentially buying high pr domains, redesigning the site and adding new content to rank for his keywords. I reported his link-wheel scheme to Google and posted a message on the webmaster forum - no luck there. So I'm wondering how is he getting away with this? Isn't Google's algorithm sophisticated enough to catch something as obvious as this? Everyone preaches about White Hat SEO, but how can honest marketers/SEOs compete with guys like him? Any thoughts would be very helpful. I can include some of the reports I've gathered if anyone is interested to study this further. thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd0 -
Is this a clear sign that one of our competitors is doing some serious black-hat SEO?
One of our competitors just recently increased their total external followed looks pretty drastically. Is it safe to say they are doing some pretty black-hat stuff? What actions exactly could this be attributed to? They've been online and in business for 10+ years and I've seen some pretty nasty drops in traffic on compete.com for them over the years. If this is black-hat work in action, would these two things be most likely related? Wh10b97
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kibin0 -
I need Black Hat Examples
So I need a little help. I'm guest lecturing this week for a local college class on web design. We are going to be talking about Black Hat design for a little bit and things to avoid. I'd like to share some examples in the wild of old school tactics, keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text. Anyone have any good examples? If you don't want to share them publicly feel free to sent me a private message. I would like to give the students some interesting examples so they can visualize it. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BCutrer0 -
Two plus two equals four! Grey hat alive and well
Rand is unquestionably much smarter than I however his pronouncements concerning the link building don't seem to hold true for some sectors of the online marketplace. We sell upholstery leather and one of our main competitor runs the table with the most important search terms and has a total garbage backlink profile. I don't know if there is some onsite magic they are working but they don't use brand name anchor text, links are not relevant to their products and most of their links are from high DA blogs, craps posts to .edu forums and no follow. The point is, maybe black hat is out but a lot of what I see being rewarded out there suggests grey hat is alive and well.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | leatherhidestore0 -
Black Hat? Is it really possible my new client paid someone to SEO the word "here"?
I just took on a client and first thing I saw in Webmaster Tools was the dreaded "Unnatural Link Patterns" message dated Apr 7th, 2012. MajesticSEO is reporting 212 backlinks, OSE is reporting 251. Nothing out of the ordinary, in fact they only anchor text is their brand. However, we then ran an SEO PowerSuite Crawl and found 429 backlinks with 78.1% of links use the anchor text "here" and 77.9% of all links point to the same URL. If this is indeed true I can see why they got the message from Google. The company has admitted they hired a service to do SEO for $299/mo for several months but when they saw no results they quit. Could this company really have gone after "here". It not, I can't find anything that would give them the message they got from Google Webmaster Tools.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Dweber0 -
Understanding competitors link building tactics (possibly black hat stuff that seems to work)
So checking out the backlinks on a competitor’s page for a term I’m looking to work on, a page they rank pretty well for, I can’t but happen to note the kinds of sites that grant this company – who are well known in their field – its successes. Many of the links to this page I’m interested in appear within short articles on blogs, really bad Wordpress blogs that are certainly just for SEO use. My questions are: Where do people usually source these blogs which typically contain material on a range of different topics? Are these probably paid links? How do they get so much content out there, albeit similar content, to so many of the hastily cobbled efforts? Would that be an agency with connections or a blogging community site? How can any search engine lend credibility to my competitor’s links when the article below has nonsense for penis enlargement stuff. Seriously?!? How are they not being penalised? It’s frustrating because these aren’t the tactics I want to employ but they seems to offer success, but also, if your link is in an article that followed by another on penis pills, how I can take Google seriously in its stated aim of making things this prone to manipulation.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0