You may have come across the terms black/grey/white hat. The term pertains to the methods used to get more traffic to your site, the darker the colour of your hat the more unethical/sneaky or frowned on by the search engines.
How to determine if an activity is black hat
It doesn’t really matter if you or I consider a technique to be black hat, it’s whether or not the search engines will interpret your actions as being black hat. Unfortunately Google/Yahoo/live do not publish a list for us to follow. The best rule of thumb is if it seems a bit devious it probably is.
If you are caught doing the naughty then you will probably be punished. Your site might lose rankings or you may be banned altogether. It’s a risk some take but today I’d like to look at what is strictly white hat.
White hat linking
The only way to be truly white hat is to ignore most SEO advice and just create good content. If you create good content other sites will link to it and the search engines will follow those links and consider that link a recommendation.
You can be creative by letting others know about your content by emailing them if you think your content is relevant. Don’t send out spam, create unique emails as if you were writing a personal letter. Do your research and think quality rather than quantity.
That’s it. Any other method will have a tinge of grey hat to it. I know it sound crazy.
Off white links
You can of course venture out onto the web and leave comments on other blogs, post in forums and use signature links in each post or maybe submit some content to an article directory or submit your site to a directory.
This off white type of linking will probably not get you into trouble as everyone does it and it’s not dirty linking. However you are technically soliciting links.
I am no SEO and try to create good content. It would be good to here what SEO’s or other have to say about White hat techniques and all these phrases I keep on coming up with. I kind of like the sound of dirty linking.
