Firstly, what is it?
White Hat SEO is the recommended way of optimizing a site for good performance on search engines. Some examples would be:
- Using clean validated HTML markup
- Writing good relevant up date content regularly to keep your users informed
- Organizing your pages and naming them clearly, much like organizing your room
- Refer to our article on SEO - The Basics for more helpful tips and information
Black Hat SEO is the art of abusing web technologies in order for you to gain better rankings. Examples would be:
- Link farming - creating many false websites and or pages that link back to your own
- Keyword stuffing - placing lots of irrelevant keywords into your Meta tags, these are no longer used to determine relevance
- Creating hidden content that only renders when seen by a search bot that the user never sees, such as a mass of keywords
- Cloaking WebPages - displaying optimized content to search engines and different content to your users
Search engines have evolved a lot in recent years and have almost super human abilities (or Pigeon insight) to detect attempts at defrauding the ranking process. Participating in Black hat SEO techniques can and will get your site demoted or worse totally banned from search engine results which means your site will never show up in the search results pages.
For further reading and best practices, we recommend you read the following guidelines.
SEO - The Basics
Google webmaster guidelines