Wherever you read about search engine optimisation you will come across
the phrases black hat, white hat or grey hat. Dictionaries tend
to define ‘white hat’ as ‘hero or good man’ and
this expression was probably derived from the early cowboy films where
the good guys inevitably wore white hats and the baddies wore black
hats.
White hat SEO's adhere to the letter of the search engine guidelines
(Google, Yahoo, MSN)
and black hat SEO's will use any method they can to promote their site
while trying to avoid getting banned. Grey Hats are in
between using the best from both.
Black Hat:
So what sort of things constitute Black Hat SEO? There are three main
areas where black hat SEO's operate.
The most common area is hidden text which is text that is embedded in
the html code and seen by the search engines but not seen by website
visitors. That gets your site banned.
The second area is showing one page to the search engines and a different
page to humans. This is called cloaking and one method in particular
is used almost exclusively, it is called IP cloaking. Here a software
switch monitors the IP address of a user and compares it to a database
of known Search Engine IP addresses. If the IP address is not recognized
as belonging to a Search Engine the user is switched to pages designed
for human consumption. If the IP address is determined to be
from a search engine it is allowed to proceed to pages that have been
specially designed for search engines only. This will also get your
site removed from Google. If you want to know more about this technique
you can read about commercial software available for IP cloaking at KloakIt and fantomas.
The third area of operation is content generation. Here the black hat
SEO takes content (freely available articles from a database for example)
and uses software to rewrite them automatically to produce original
and unique keyword rich content for the search engines.
Content generation is even offered on external servers like TurboSM and
it has now become possible to generate millions of pages for thousands
of domains with very little effort. However, Grey
Hat site building is now taking over from the look
of this product here.
Black Hat is to be avoided by anyone looking for long term income
from advertising. Your site will be removed from the search engines
within weeks. Leaving you to keep making more sites even faster to
stay ahead of the game. Meanwhile the Black Hat sites just keep
cramming the Internet with millions of junk pages.
White Hat:
See Example below of building a White Hat site.
Grey Hat:
Grey Hat techniques are useful for small business owners or anyone
interested in producing income from their site quickly.
It takes the best of both worlds. Utilizing automatic site generation
software it is possible to build new sites quickly and start earning
money almost immediately. Unlike White Hat which may take months
or years to make any cash, if ever!
There is nothing wrong in short circuiting the site manufacturing process
and putting the whole thing on automatic, while you sip Martini's on
some beautiful beach. While others labour away each day, painfully
building page by page, indexing, submitting to search engines, making
site maps and waiting..........
Where the major problem exists is the content and how to integrate money
making ads into the generated pages.
This is where Grey Hat technology makes all the difference. Firstly,
it incorporates real articles about real things that real people will
read. Secondly, it can automatically integrate any affiliate advertising,
google Adsense or other 'click' ads and place them on the right page
in the right place for maximum effect. And, do it completely on auto-pilot
each and every hour of each and every day.
Basically, Grey Hat is to web sites as Henry Ford is to cars. It brings
mass production to site manufacturing.
Example:
The following is completely true and factual, only the domain names have
been omitted for obvious reasons. it gives a perfect illustration of
using White or Grey Hat techniques.
In July 2005 we decide to build a travel site using a good TLD
name owned since 1999. It took some 3 months of dedicated hard work
to build and another 3 months of titivating and adding some affiliate
advertising. By
the end of 6 months of laborious work we had this great site full of
original travel content spread over around 600 pages. It was now January
and not a single penny had been earnt!
Each day we added things that would help increase the quality of the
site. We spent ages optimising pages for search engines and submitting.
Then it happened!! In March (8 months later) we made our first affiliate
ad commission. The site now produces about £1000 earnings per month
and growing slowly.
Okay, you may say. That's not bad, even if it took nearly a year.
But now look at the next example.
Two months ago, we started using different technology based on Grey
Hat. Using
a good auto site generator and Article Maker from WebCPG,
we built 30 sites of around 200 pages each in about 5 days. Each site
was automatically SEO honed to perfection. The content was factual, structured
and informative and exactly in context with the page title. Context sensitive
affiliate and Google ads were automatically built into each page along
with graphics.
The site maps were built and uploaded, Google pinged and submitted to
search engines ALL AUTOMATICALLY. Not only that, new pages were
scheduled for automatic upload and submission on a weekly basis, making
some of the sites now with over 500 pages. RSS feeds were automatically
added and existing page content was regularly updated.
In the first two weeks, these brand new sites started producing real
money. Now, two months later they have produced over $1200 from Google
Adsense alone! More importantly, this is increasing around 5% daily
as the sites get better known in the search engine stats.
So in comparing White and Grey Hat sites, there is no comparison.
One is hard slog, but you may get there in the end, if your very fortunate
though many are not. The
other is a guaranteed money earner, from month one and, its totally
automated. Leaving you time to enjoy your earnings.
While we shall still build the occasional 'work of art' site, from now
on all our efforts are on Grey Hat production of quick quality
sites that make money that we shall have much more time to enjoy.
As with all articles on our site, you may freely copy and paste this
Grey Hat article providing you include the credit links below.
Affiliates 
