Differences between White Hat & Black Hat Seo

It goes without saying & the ethics of seo i work by that any type of black hat used or tried to be used deserves to be punished. It is unfair & is usually in place to obtain un-deserved rankings for a some what questionable product. White hat seo done properly shows hard work, commitment & a true show of skill successful or not. I have been looking at entries in the UK webmaster world seocontest2008 & as it stands most entries are using white hat seo methods to do well in the seo contest. The beginning of the 2008 seo contest showed a few black hat entries fly to the top, as the competition is now well underway with new seo practitioner joining by the day the few entries i had personally singled out for using unfair methods of obtaining high search engine rankings seem to have been completely taken from Google's Index (Well done Big G).

Below i have outlined the simple structure behind the two methods of Seo, look through them both, You will no doubt be able to put a couple of black hat methods i have mentioned below to actual entries in the seo contest.

Black Hat Seo

Taking advantage of the weaknesses in some algorithms used by search engines, some people developed unethical techniques (known as Black Hat SEO or Spamdexing) for increasing the website rankings:

• Hidden text – usually text that has the same color as the website's background therefore only visible to spiders
• Keyword stuffing – adding long lists of keywords on the page, hoping to attract more search engines
• URL stuffing – adding too many keywords in the URLs
• Generated sites – also called scraping, this technique allows webmasters to quickly create hundreds of websites in just a few minutes; since content is gathered from different sources by robots, most of the phrases don't even make sense to a human
• Link spam – probably the most popular Black Hat SEO technique involves linking to websites with help from robots in the most unexpected places.
• Sneaky redirects – the users is rapidly redirected from the landing page (usually build with scraped content) to the “real” page.
• Cloaking – creating two different web pages, one for humans to see and another one for robots.

Most of the Spamindexing tools are sold on the “black market”, but some are available as free, open source software. Search Engines are constantly fighting against these kinds of unethical practices.

White Hat Seo

All the search engines such as Google, Yahoo! & Live (MSN) reward & value the following:

• Short loading times
• Frequent updates
• Sites that contain contact information
• Unique content
• Pages primarily designed for humans, not spiders
• Sites that link to additional sources of information
• Sites that provide secure connections, especially in the case of e-commerce sites