Go Grey: Different Strategies you can do in Using Grey Hat SEO
If you search about SEO in the internet, chances are you will stumble upon different kinds of colored hats in SEO. There are White Hat, Grey Hat and Black Hat SEOs. You might ask, what is the difference between these three kinds? Well, White Hat SEO focuses on quality content. Writers of this kind of SEO keep the readers’ interest in mind and do not rely heavily on getting higher rankings in the search engines. So how do they climb up in the rankings? Because of their quality content, other websites will place links in their websites pointing to them. Also, one important thing is that White Hat SEO follows the Google guidelines strictly.
Black Hat SEO has content which are made in order to trick and manipulate the search engine results. This type of SEO takes advantage of technology in order to make a pool of low quality web pages and websites which are not connected to the actual content. This will definitely get these websites higher in the rankings, but it will have higher chances of being blacklisted.
In this article, we will focus on Grey Hat SEO, which is the middle ground between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. This type of SEO will use tools which are not accepted by White Hat SEO but at the same time will not fall into the category of Black Hat SEO.
There are different practices and techniques when it comes in writing Grey Hat SEO and here are some of them:
Paying for links
It’s acceptable to pay for links if these are being used for advertising purposes. If not, then they are considered a questionable act. When it comes to putting links in your site, you must do so to have higher rankings in search engine and not to have a huge number of links housed in your site. If you abuse paid links, your site can be in jeopardy and in turn, could be penalized.
Cloaking
This happens when the website owners describes and give information about their site to search engines which are not 100% completely what their website is all about. There is an exception to the rule, though. If you have a website which is open to the public but at the same time can be a venue where members can view private content, then cloaking is acceptable. But a lot of websites choose to abuse this tool which can lead to Black Hat SEO.
Having duplicate content
Indexing websites can have duplicate content. But people use this technique in Grey Hat SEO. In order to counter this tool, some websites use filters to enable them to check and find out other websites which might have duplicate content as their site.
There are still some people who are hesitant in using Grey Hat SEO. First of, it is still not acceptable by Google standards. Some people will think that if you are using Grey Hat SEO, you are doing something illegitimate. But the main reason why people are using this type of SEO is to find the grey area between the legal and the illegal side of SEO. People might think that White Hat SEO is too stifling and at the same time, Black Hat SEO is too risky. Grey Hat SEO will work out for you if you want to employ a certain level of risk in having your web content optimized.
