Hungerford Web Design

As you move into the world of SEO and start to understand much of the terminology you will no doubt start to wonder about the colour of your hat.

In the same way that hackers, scripters and crackers tend towards particular techniques and acceptable disclosure practices, SEO’s have adopted a similar standpoint. What are the hats?

The three main colours of hat are black, white and grey. Each hat describes a set of principles which the wearer predominantly adopts. That isn’t to say that one won’t dip into the other on occaison, or even regularly use a particular technique associated with another set of ideas/ideals.

Black hat

In short, black hat SEO adopts a set of techniques which are mostly frowned upon or completely disallowed by a major search engine. The useage of such techniques are both high-risk but also potentially high yield can be obtained from using them. The benefits can outweight the risks but the downsides could see your site penalised in search results or dropped completely from listings.

Grey hat

It’s often considered that grey being between black and white whould naturally be the middle ground in terms of the techniques employed. That isn’t the case in SEO… It’s my opinion that white is absolute, if tainted by any other colour then it just simply isn’t white. By that token, grey is simply a lighter shade of black. I believe grey hat SEO to focus on what isn’t said. As an example, a white hat SEO will focus on following the guidelines, rules and suggested practices, a black hat SEO will use the same guides and decide which to ignore or do the complete opposite of to improve their rankings and a grey hat will find holes in the policies where actions and rules just simply aren’t covered.

White hat

It probably needs little description, especially given the descriptions above. White hat SEO’s follow the rules. When google, yahoo and msn release their whitepapers and guidelines on conforming to their rules, the typical white hat will read, digest and act based on what the rules say.

These descriptions are very much putting types of people into boxes, the truth is that many of these tactics are ambiguous and overlap each other. I believe that the mark of a persons true hat is their natural tendency and intent. Whilst a whitehat could fall foul of a mis-advised or understood practice, they maintain their whitehat status by definition of their intent. Those working towards guidelines and rules and doing their best show a good level of integrity and morality (in search engine terms), grey hats walk a fine legal line, and black hats do what needs to be done to reach their goal.

I would definately class myself as a whitehat but not conciously. I simply follow good webmaster design and development practices. I write good syntax, I do my best to tick all of the right boxes and I don’t do anything which would knowingly negatively affect any of my visitors or people linking to me. It isn’t a concious decision, it’s simply the way I do things.

What about you? would you consider yourself any particular hat, or not really informed enough to make the decision? It’s interesting when speaking to whitehat SEO’s as the majority are almost biblical in their quest for “whiteness” and will report and attempt to negatively affect sites employing bad tactics. Ask that same person if they would employ a blackhat tactic if they KNEW it would only positively affect them without any consequences and watch them pause for thought…..

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