Many of our readers may already be familiar with Black Hat and White Hat SEO, their definitions and different techniques.  However, most people are not fully aware about  Gray Hat SEO. Gray Hat SEO may sound unfamiliar to many people. But what is Gray Hat SEO and what are its techniques. Does Gray Hat SEO violates Google’s Quality Guidelines?

Before we go into detail about Gray Hat SEO, we should first take a look into the definition of what a Black hat and White Hat SEO are:

White Hat SEO is the ideal SEO principle. White Hat SEO practitioners abides with the Search Engine Guidelines, thus making it the ideal principle. This principle focuses on creating content for the users or readers not for the search engines and making these content readily and easily be crawled by the spiders.  The principle relies with the content and marketing skills to achieve rankings rather than the use of automated applications.  This principle also understand that search engine rankings takes time, and success does not happen in just one night.  White Hat SEO techniques provides more valuable inbound links because the sites that that link to them considers their content valuable. With White Hat SEO Content Is King. Because White Hat SEO principles abides with the Search Engine Guidelines, thus there is no risk of getting banned by search engines and visitors that visits your websites will more likely to convert.

If White Hat SEO is the ideal SEO principle, then its opposite is the Black Hat SEO.  Black Hat SEO is defined by Google as the techniques in which it violates the Quality Guidelines or Search Engine Guidelines.  Black Hat SEO also known as spamming. It uses the techniques that Google and other search engines prohibit.  Cloaking, hidden text and keyword stuffing are the most commonly used Black Hat SEO techniques.  Black Hat SEO is all about getting fast search engine optimisation results, thus it uses tools and applications to create poor quality sites and to gain inbound links from other websites.  The techniques and methods used in Black Hat SEO can optmise and will often get higher rankings in search engines rankings, however once search engines catches that your website does not adhere to the Search Engine Guidelines you may get banned and will often get crashed.  Black SEO is very risky and damaging and it does not promises you an effective Search Engine Optimisation results.

White Hat and Black Hat SEO are the most common techniques that we often hear.  But Gray Hat SEO is not that very common to everyone. Gray sounds like in the middle of White and Black and logically the colour for the middle ground, but it isn’t. Gray Hat SEO is something that does not intentionally do anything that will result to getting banned by search engines but are not obsessed into following each guidelines.  Gray Hat SEO is basically the practical SEO and it is something all about risks versus rewards. Link-buying, keyword file naming and keyword density manipulation are some of the examples of Gray Hat SEO. Search engines does not like some of the Gray Hat SEO practices but are not necessarily against their guidelines.

So, what  colour you think your SEO is?  The colour of your SEO should be determined by your goals and objectives.  I would never recommend using Black Hat SEO, because such strategy is short lived and too risky. I recommend that you should strive for White Hat SEO – The UK SEO Agency Only practice ethical White Hat SEO