Two SEO
Methods
"White hat" methods
An SEO tactic,
technique or method is considered "White hat" if it conforms to the
search engines' guidelines and/or involves no deception. As the
search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or
commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White Hat
SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring
that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is
the same content a user will see.
White Hat
advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for
search engines, and then make that content easily accessible to
their spiders, rather than game the system. White hat SEO is in many
ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility,
although the two are not identical.
"Black hat" methods
"Black hat" SEO
are methods to try to improve rankings that are disapproved of by
the search engines and/or involve deception. This can range from
text that is "hidden", either as text colored similar to the
background or in an invisible or left of visible div, or by
redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to
one that is more human friendly. A method that sends a user to a
page that was different from the page the search engined ranked is
Black hat as a rule. One well known example is Cloaking, the
practice of serving one version of a page to search engine
spiders/bots and another version to human visitors.
Search engines
may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by
reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their
databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either
automatically by the search engines' algorithms or by a manual
review of a site.
One infamous
example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and
Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. Both companies,
however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were
restored to Google's list.
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