SEO measures can be divided into white hat SEO, which attacks directly, and black hat SEO, which is tricky and high risk.
Considering Google’s evaluation standards, which make it difficult to recover once your rating drops, you should of course implement white hat measures, but there are cases where you may be implementing black hat measures without knowing it.
This time, let’s take a look at the differences and characteristics between white hat SEO and black hat SEO.
What is white hat SEO?
When you do SEO, most of the standard SEO involves optimizing HTML tags and selecting and writing keywords tailored to the industry, service, and product, which are the basics of creating a web page. Measures will be taken according to the rules.
In this way, “white hat SEO” is a “straight attack” approach.
What exactly is white hat SEO? So what is proper SEO? Google helps with Search Console
Explained in
our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide
.
Now, let’s take a look at the important parts of the starter guide to see what methods are actually available.
Help Google find your content
This involves submitting your sitemap using SearchConsole and having it crawled by Google.
Tell Google which pages should not be crawled
Use the noindex tag to exclude pages that you do not want to be indexed, such as pages with thin content, from crawling targets.
Help Google (and users) understand your content
In this section, the main thing to do is to make title tags and descriptions different for each page.
He also says that it is no good to be obsessed with being featured in search results and to set something that is different from the content of the page.
As I will introduce later, this kind of SEO “cheating” is a black hat.
Also, as is often the case, titles and descriptions that list keywords are listed as methods to avoid.
Although people may not be very conscious of heading tags, they are written to standardize the font size of headings, etc.
We recommend that you read the following items, as they contain guidelines on general SEO techniques, such as navigation and hierarchical structure, smartphone compatibility, and structural tags.
Manage your visibility in Google search results Organize your site hierarchy Optimize your content Optimize your images Make your site mobile-friendly Promote your website
Google has clearly announced “this is what SEO should be done”.
For those of us who regularly take SEO measures, we should at least follow this help, and when we say “actual white hat methods,” we mean these methods.
2. What is black hat SEO?
At the opposite end of the spectrum is “black hat SEO,” which uses “phony” and “trick” techniques to perform SEO.
In fact, this is also listed in
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines (Quality Guidelines)
.
If you take a quick look at the contents,
The following items are listed as “specific guidelines.”
Automatic generation of content Participation in link programs Creation of pages with little or no original content Cloaking Unauthorized redirects Hidden text or hidden links Directed pages Unauthorized copying of content Not enough added value Stuffing pages with keywords unrelated to the content Creating pages with malicious behavior such as phishing or installing viruses, Trojans, or other malware Abusing rich snippet markup Go to Google Sending automated queries for
Among the above items, “hidden text and hidden links” are still sometimes seen.
This is a method of embedding keywords in the same font color as the background, and in the past, many people used it as an SEO measure.
Similarly, embedding keywords that are unrelated to the content is considered a black hat.
It also mentions participation in link farms (link farms) that exploit the importance of backlinks, and also takes a page to explain content related to copied content that plagiarizes blog articles.
Also, methods that automatically re-examine URLs and encourage registration when they are excluded from the index are not recommended. In other words, Google recognizes this as a fraudulent method.
As mentioned above, past SEO measures may now be black hat, so be careful.
If you are perceived as a black hat, your search rankings will drop significantly, and in the worst case scenario, you may be excluded from the index, so be careful.
summary
It’s common for people who have a little bit of experience with SEO to unknowingly engage in black hat practices, and may be consulted about removing their content from indexing.
The way we approach SEO measures is changing day by day due to Google’s algorithm changes, so let’s perform white hat SEO while receiving accurate information from Google.
If you use the methods mentioned above as a strategy, you will definitely be able to expect good results without using tricky methods such as black hats.