White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO = compliant optimization according to Google guidelines: high-quality content, clean technology, natural link building. Black Hat uses tricks like cloaking/keyword stuffing and risks penalties up to index exclusion.

The term White Hat SEO (and its negatively connoted equivalent Black Hat SEO) comes from the cliché box of American Western films: In classic Westerns, the hero is always recognized by the white cowboy hat, while the villain wears a black cowboy hat.

Transferred to the modern internet world, this means: White Hat SEO is the type of search engine optimization that follows the rules and respects the guidelines of Google & Co., while Black Hat methods violate these guidelines—such as through spam—and are penalized.

What is White Hat SEO?

White Hat SEO includes all the things that Google recommends for OnPage optimization: Diligently creating unique content with good keywords, regular updates of the pages, and many good backlinks.

However, Google changes its guidelines from time to time, and some practices that were considered White Hat SEO until recently are now classified as Black Hat SEO (or at least in the gray area). This includes buying backlinks and now also the arranged link exchange between webmasters.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Even though it is not always possible to fully adhere to the rules of White Hat SEO, there are certain practices that are so black-hat that any reasonable webmaster will avoid if they don't want to be penalized. This includes, for example, cloaking, where the user sees a nicely designed good website, but an extremely search engine optimized version exists for the search engine crawler under the same URL. Similarly, so-called doorway or gateway pages work, which normal users do not see and are crammed with links and keywords to ensure better ranking. If the gateway pages are discovered, the entire website gets removed from the index.

White hat measures

What White Hat measures are now in demand for search engine marketing? Here are several options:

Content: "Content is king," as they commonly say, and it's true. The higher the quality of a page's content, the more people are interested in it, and the more often a page is clicked and rises in the rankings. This also automatically increases the willingness to create natural links.
Keywords: The use of appropriate keywords in the text existing on the website is important for White Hat SEO. The keyword should also be present in the metadata and in the URL of a page. Keyword stuffing, on the other hand, is a Black Hat tactic and should not be done in search engine optimization.
Links: Links should occur naturally and come from high-quality sites. Purchased links don't bring much; a natural link building is better.
Customer reviews: one should find a way to motivate satisfied customers to leave a positive review of the company.

Advantages of White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO has some advantages over the Black Hat variant:

For ethical reasons, it is much better to choose White. Only in this way can one honestly justify the positioning in the SERPs.
In the long run, the costs are cheaper because, unlike penalized Black Hat measures, the White measures don't have to be corrected with potentially a lot of money.
In the long run, there is no need to fear penalties if everything is above board in search engine optimization.
White Hat ensures consistency in the rankings, as one does not have to expect penalties for using unfair means.

Disadvantages of White Hat SEO

A disadvantage is that one has to limit oneself to a few measures. The problem with this is that very few competitors strictly adhere to White Hat SEO. Many operate in the field of Gray Hat methods, where measures that are not strictly prohibited are applied, but the boundaries of the black area are still touched. For example, not very conspicuous methods like unnatural link building are often used to move further forward in the ranking. Other measures include Negative SEO, keyword stuffing, hidden links, doorway pages, or domain spamming.

Another disadvantage is the initially high costs for white measures. However, you should always be willing to spend the money, because as mentioned above, it is definitely worth it in the long run. If a black measure comes to light, it usually becomes more expensive to rectify the mistakes afterward and to catch up in the rankings.

White Hat SEO as a long-term strategy

The reason Black Hat SEO still exists is due to operators who do not think long-term but only want to push their dubious sites short-term and gain an advantage before being detected by Google and removed from the index. In the meantime, they have often already made a lot of money.

A serious webmaster or shop owner who wants to build a successful online business over the years should rely as much as possible on White Hat SEO and adhere to Google's rules—only in this way can their own visibility be gradually improved.

However, one is forced to review the White, Black, and Grey Hat strategies every few years, as they are subject to constant change. A rule that applies today may not be valid tomorrow. Additionally, there will always be applicants who try to find their way into the Google rankings through unfair means, but one must always reckon with a penalty from a search engine like Google. It is always safest to think long-term and create your site for the reader—and not for the crawler.