Did you know there’s such a thing as Black and White Hat SEO?

It deals with the ethical aspects of SEO and it’s what I’ve been learning about this week.

True to its name, Black Hat SEO is frowned upon and could get your well-designed website deindexed by Google.

White Hat SEO is the preferred method for optimizing a website and will put you in the good graces of Google.

So you're probably wondering what could be unethical about SEO. What could a person possibly do to a website that would cause Google to deindex it?

First off, what is deindexing or more importantly, indexing?

Google stores all pages that it knows about in its index. If Google doesn’t know about your brand new website, your pages will not be indexed.

On the flip side, Google can remove your pages from its index if you break Google SEO rules. When this happens, your website won’t show up in Google’s search results… ever. Or at least until you fix it.

Back to our original question, why would Google deindex a website?

Both Black Hat and White Hat SEO have the same goal, to improve a site’s visibility. However, each side uses different strategies to accomplish this.

Let’s start with White Hat SEO.

This strategy focuses on quality content, effective keywords, relevant backlinks, internal links, and meta descriptions to list a few.

These strategies will help your website rank higher in the search engine and help you avoid being penalized or de-indexed.

Your website should contain only quality content that is relevant to your site. For instance, if you are selling women’s clothing, a blog about men’s clothing has little relevance to your website.

In addition, your website should contain the most relevant information on women’s clothing in comparison to your competition.

If a potential customer searches for sundresses (which you sell), you want your website to populate at the top of the search engine and you want the customer to stay on your website long enough to make an impression and ultimately purchase a dress.

If another competitive company does this better, change your website to capture those customers.

Effective keywords that have relevance should be used throughout your website. This strategy helps your website populate higher on Google when people search for your services/products.

Just be careful not to overuse any single keyword. This is known as keyword stuffing and falls in line with Black Hat SEO.

Although single keywords are tempting and easy to use, long-tail keywords often work the best.

A good example pertaining to sundresses would be “Women’s sundresses with sleeves”.

Countless websites contain the keyword “sundresses”, but far fewer contain the long-tail keyword version. This means less competition and a higher likelihood of populating at the top of the search engine.

Keep in mind that you will be targeting a smaller population. However, you are more likely to generate actual sales because this group is generally shopping and not just browsing.

Take a look at these keywords side by side to see the difference in monthly searches. FYI, these are real-time numbers from a program called Semrush.

One of the most important factors in White Hat SEO is backlinks. Google likes to see other sites linking back to you. This shows status.

If Google sees that other sites are talking about you, it’s as though they’ve given you a vote of confidence.

For instance, if your best friend, your boss, and your sister all tell you that Nike shoes are the best, you are likely to go buy a pair because you feel they are credible.

However, if your sister goes on and on about how amazing a pair of Nike shoes are, you’re likely to think she's highly opinionated and the shoes might not work for you.

With that said, Google values backlinks from multiple sources. It also values backlinks from multiple credible sources.

Would you buy a pair of shoes if the advice came from a homeless man, a drug addict, and a bank robber? Probably not.

Google thinks the same way and will rank your website higher for receiving trustworthy backlinks. These sites should contain high-quality content that is similar to your website.

For instance, a trustworthy blog about shoes would logically link to a shoe store. However, a trustworthy bank website wouldn’t logically link to an Italian restaurant.

Although backlinks are important, they can be hard to generate because they require the help of external sources.

Internal links, on the other hand, are an easy way to reference your own website and add value at the same time.

Their concept is the same as backlinks. The more internal links your site has, the more credible your website is.

However, it’s important to be careful about how many you add. If you include too many internal links on a single page, Google will flag this as Black Hat SEO.

They feel you are trying too hard to rank your website higher, which makes it seem as though your website’s content is thin and has little relevance.

A good rule of thumb is two or three links per page. The more pages your website contains, the more links you can naturally incorporate.

These links should pertain to the information being read. It’s natural to link to your contact page if people need your address.

It’s not natural to link to your recently released iPhone if people are searching for the cheapest phone options.

Last but not least, your site’s meta description is extremely important. This description is the sentence or two under your website’s title in the search results.

White Hat SEO focuses on descriptions that accurately describe the content of the website.

Don’t overstuff your description with keywords to try and rank higher in the search engine. Google will sniff this out pretty quickly and penalize your website.

For instance, a bad meta description for Design Wizards would be:

Here at Design Wizards, we design websites with the best designs and publish publications with superb designs to give you the best design out of all the designs you could ask for.

Sound spammy?

Ya, I thought so. Not only will Google penalize you for spammy content, but your viewers are likely to view your website as unreliable and not click on it to begin with.

Finally, let's get to the part you’ve been wondering about. What is Black Hat SEO and how could it be so bad that Google would penalize you for it?

First of all, Google's objective is to give the user the best possible experience.

Google could care less which pizza store ranks the highest in search results. What Google cares about is presenting users with credible pizza stores in your area with good reviews and easy to use websites.

Unfortunately, the pizza store (let’s call them ABC Pizza) doesn’t view things that way.

ABC Pizza probably has a high sales goal for the month.

If they aren’t meeting their goals, they may revert to Black Hat SEO to quickly expose their website to anyone searching the internet. Even if the searcher doesn’t want pizza.

These techniques degrade Google and give the user a bad experience. Let’s talk through them so you can see their negative effects and why Google would be prompted to penalize you for them.

If ABC Pizza wanted to rank high in search results for unrelated topics such as Ellen DeGeneres, they could add a sentence on their website saying, “Ellen DeGeneres loves eating ABC Pizza when she travels.”

While the sentence makes sense, the context is rather spammy.

More than likely ABC pizza will confuse Ellen DeGeneres fans rather than bait them into buying pizza.

It’s far safer to only use keywords that pertain to your company. Choose keywords that describe the quality of your products.

You want customers to come to your website naturally, not forced.

These pages are fake pages overloaded with keywords. Because of this, they are easy for Google to find and therefore populate at the top of search engines.

However, because they are fake pages, they automatically direct users to a separate page when clicked.

Once a user leaves the doorway page, it’s often impossible to get back to it.

There’s some controversy on how bad doorway pages are which you can explore further on cognitiveseo.com.

This article also gives more definite examples of the many ways that doorway pages are used.

I think the word itself lends an ear toward Black Hat SEO.

Cloaking is the process of presenting a different site to human visitors than to bots (computer robots that index websites).

When a company cloaks a website, it’s fairly easy to stuff keywords on one side while making the other normal.

Unfortunately, this produces sites that have little relevance to the topic at hand.

For instance, let’s say that Susy is doing a research project on earthquakes, so she Googles Earthquakes in California.

However, Susy is confused because the top site that populates only mentions Earthquakes once and has nothing to do with California.

More than likely, Susy came across a cloaked website. The author of the website stuffed keywords pertaining to earthquakes in California into the cloaked side of the website.

You might wonder what the benefit of doing this is. Basically, it drastically increases the foot traffic for a website.

The downside, however, is that 99% of your new foot traffic leaves your site right away because it has little relevance to their search.

If Google catches a cloaked website, it will penalize it fairly quickly. For obvious reasons, cloaked websites greatly degrade users experience.

Last but certainly not least, is hidden text. Another deceptive way to add extra keywords to a website is to simply make them invisible.

This can be done by making the text white on a white background or making the font size zero.

Once again, Google frowns upon the usage of hidden text and will penalize a website for doing so.

There are many other forms of White and Black Hat SEO that I haven’t covered in this blog. Check out searchenginejournal.com for a more comprehensive list.

However, this should give you a good idea of what your website should and shouldn’t be doing.

If an SEO specialist talks you into Black Hat techniques, beware. You may reap the benefits for a short while, but Google will catch you in the long run.

Furthermore, if Google penalizes your website, there’s a lengthy process to remove that penalization. Trust me, it’s not worth the risk.

In case anyone is wondering, Design Wizards only practices White Hat SEO techniques.

These techniques may take months, if not years, to show noticeable results, but they will last the test of time.

For further tips and tricks on SEO, check back next week. We’ll discuss the topic of how long SEO takes to “work”.

Until then, happy web surfing.