What is the Difference between Black hat SEO and Grey Hat SEO?

Weblinkindia - do you read other peoples replies before you post? Because if you do you will see that my comment above and also Robert Ralph's both say that white hat Seo doesn't really exist.

So if you think that white hat SEO methods do exist it will be good to know what you think they are.
Guest posting? Grey hat.

Article marketing? Grey hat.

Commenting on high PR blogs? Grey hat.

These are all manipulating Google and so are against Google's terms of service.

What do you think?

Malc

 

Hi bhupendra92 -
What you say does really give a wrong impression.

First of all a detail – grey hat SEO is hardly "illegal": I guess you mean it's against Google's TOS – terms of service.

But my main argument with you is you say your website will not get punished for using grey hat SEO methods.

Google has punished many people for using grey hat SEO methods.

The thing is, Google knows the quality of the back links coming to your site. It keeps all this information in its databases.

Let's say you have 500 backlinks coming to your site from other sites. And let's say 250 of those are from sites with a page rank of two or more.

You will probably get slapped by Google.

Because this is an "unnatural" backlink pattern.

A natural link pattern will be more like:
PR n/a - 210
PR0 - 200
PR1 - 50
PR2 - 25
PR3 - 8
PR4 - 5
PR5 - 2
... Or something like that.

There is no precise definition of what a natural link pattern is but an unnatural link pattern is pretty easy to spot.

So if you have used grey hat methods – such as digging out high PR blogs that you can make comments on, and only commenting on high PR ones, then that's going to get you slapped by Google sooner or later.

You need to understand how Google works before you try to manipulate your backlink profile. So this is something to try and learn as you go along.

Best, Malc

PS how do you see what your backlink pattern is?

A pretty good way is to use SEO Powersuite which I review here: http://heymalc.com/seo-powersuite-review

SEO Powersuite contains a module called SEO Spyglass. Stick a site in there - including your own - and it will pull out lots of the backlinks and the PR is in one fo the columns. Click the column heading and it will sort by PR descending. Then you know where many of your high PR backlinks are from. VERY useful!

Here is a screenshot of SEO Spyglass, showing the PR column
http://www.screencast.com/t/3UYTOb9mdmGo

 

Forum Posting and social bookmarking are still the white Hat SEO methods.

 

Yeah - if you don't ever want to rank, those methods will work in the way you say.

But "Forum Posting" has to be done right; and "social bookmarking" is pretty much dead these days.

Guest posting is probably the "white hat-est" way of getting BL you are gonna find today.



Malc