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M$1 January 22, 2009 01:26 AM

What are your definitions of white hat, gray hat and black hat SEO?

Everyone has their own definition of each.  What  tactics are clearly black hat
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January 22, 2009 01:43 AM
Black Hat SEO: So evil he’s a typosquatter installing spyware. Plain illegal, too.

Charcoal Hat SEO: Optimizes really unrelated pages for all kinds of queries, but within the bounds of legality.

Dark Gray Hat SEO: This SEO is e.g. a splogger stealing content from other sites. (What, that’s better than charcoal?)

Slate Gray Hat SEO: An SEO creating link farms and such.

Gray Hat SEO: An SEO who actually reads the search engine’s webmaster guidelines, but then tries as much “evil” as she can get away with.

Light Gray Hat SEO: This SEO creates original content (lots of it), but the content is still only aimed at search engines.

Off-White Hat SEO: This guy not only ensures the site is indexable – he’ll also make sure to get lots of backlinks from friends.

White Hat SEO: This person puts up the content that people are actually searching for, and prepares the site to make it very accessible. White Hat SEOs only optimize those of their pages they deem worthy to be ranking top in search engines.

Luminescent Pearly White Hat SEO: Not only does this SEO do everything the White Hat SEO does, the LPW Hat SEO also makes sure pages will not show up for irrelevant queries.
Source(s):
Best definitions I've seen... created by Yahoo’s Tim Converse http://timconverse.wordpress.com/

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January 22, 2009 02:36 AM
Heres a great Wiki page on WebHostingTalk about this, including examples:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/wiki/White_hat,_black_hat,_and_gray_hat_SEO

In my opinion, white hat is simply doing things like making page titles, meta tags, and URL strings more relevant, building inbound links from other sites legitimately (ie affiliates with other sites related to yours, not spamming links, and not overdoing the aforementioned). My definition of gray hat seo is basically spamming your web sites URL around the Internet to get higher ranks on Google, albeit its still legal. I mean legal in that the person probably just buys some backlinks from different web sites or services. Blackhat SEO includes techniques like showing different content to Google compared to a regular visitor to boost rankings, using link farms, stuffing the page with as many keywords as possible, and other things that are against search engine policies.

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January 23, 2009 09:25 AM
Everything that is not allowed by Google is Black Hat SEO
Everything that is allowed by Google, but frowned upon, or is not allowed by Google, but is done in such a way that it is hard for them to penalize you for it, is Grey Hat SEO
Everything that is done according to the Google Guidelines is White Hat SE
Source(s):
http://www.icantinternet.org


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