Before you embark on your SEO journey, you will first want to know the different SEO strategies available to dominate search engines effectively.

To help you understand better and help you reach your destination, let’s first discuss what you must avoid doing in SEO in order to waste no time and dive straight into what you should be doing instead.

White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO Techniques

The terms’ White Hat’ and ‘Black Hat’ originated from old Western classic movies where the villains would typically wear a black cowboy hat, and the hero would be wearing a white hat. Thirty years later, the modern tech industry now refers to these terms as hackers wearing black and white hats.

And SEO experts today have managed to differentiate two different types of Search Engine Optimisation strategies by coining the terms White Hat and Black Hat SEO.

In every search engine, such as Google, there are several terms and conditions users must oblige to avoid a penalty from Google, hurting your SERPs ranking, and getting your website banned from search engines altogether! Choosing the right colour hat to wear, abiding by the guidelines set by Google, will ultimately help you lay a long-lasting and fruitful performance.

Black Hat SEO Techniques List

Black hat SEO is an SEO strategy that uses sneaky tactics and loopholes to game Google’s search engine to rank higher and outrank your competitors. In most cases, the techniques applied to go against Google’s policies and guidelines.

Unfortunately, black hat techniques are still being used today because at the end of the day, at least for some cases, it works pretty fast, pretty furiously, until they don’t.

Black hat techniques might work for a while, but the results are often short-lived and can result in your site being banned from Google!

Below are some examples of black hat SEO techniques:

• Buying Backlinks

Sure, it’s a simple process – pay some money and instantly see your ranking triple-fold within a day. There are currently plenty of backlink services on the market where people claim to sell a certain amount of backlinks for XX ringgit. Don’t be easily swayed by this. More often than so, these backlinks will do you more harm than good in the long run. Merely a temporary high, purchasing links will only give you short term and unsustainable results, damaging your domain ranking eventually.

• Hidden Text

Long ago (maybe, a decade or so), people tended to match specific font colours with the background on their website, hiding their keywords in hopes of ranking for those on Google without users noticing it being stuffed and placed awkwardly in the content. At one point, it was a practical move. However, times have changed, and Google’s bots have advanced; they will be able to catch hidden texts like these.

• Duplicating Content

Since university days, lecturers will inform their students that plagiarism is prohibited in any assignment or thesis submission. Thorough proofreading is required to prevent any duplicated content from external resources. The same goes for SEO; when you duplicate content from other websites and paste it into yours, you are bound to get penalised by Google; affecting your overall domain rating.

At Futuristic Group, the best SEO company in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, we believe in providing our partners with sustainable SEO services with a long-term success rate. Our SEO consultants will advise not even to try any black hat techniques. Instead, use only white hat SEO techniques.

White Hat SEO Techniques List

White hat SEO are techniques that comply with Google’s search engine guidelines. White hat SEO takes more time than black hat SEO, but it is more sustainable in the long run. Therefore, better for your business.

Below are some examples of white hat SEO techniques:

• Creating High Quality Content

White hat SEO techniques include creating high-quality content that is authentic and informative, educational and solving users’ problems or enquiries. It is important to create unique content as this results in attaining backlinks and building partnerships with other websites. They are also linking to you because they see a valuable resource you have created.

• Prioritise User Experience

If you ensure the content created is focused on users’ needs rather than search engines, you are heading in the right direction. With the advancement of technology, search engine (Google) crawlers can identify whether you are trying to trick them and place user satisfaction above anything else. Even though specific strategies may be effective in bringing traffic to your website, your bounce rate may also be high if the user’s needs and experience are not met. This, in return, will be detrimental to your SERP rankings in the long run.

• Acquiring Authentic Backlinks

As easy as it may be to purchase backlinks, the most sustainable and long-term solution for your website is to naturally acquire these authentic and relatable backlinks. This can be done in various ways, including guest posting, researching platforms related to your niche, products or services, and requests to link to informative and related content on your website. 

By understanding the difference from the beginning, a strong foundation for your brand can be built, and you can trust that the SEO strategies you are implementing follow guidelines while remaining effective in growing your website over time.

We hope this helps you understand the difference between Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO. At the Futuristic Group, we take pride in ensuring all of our SEO services practices white hat strategies. Contact us to know more!