Whitehat vs Blackhat SEO

When looking for a SEO (search engine optimisation) company it’s important to understand how they intend to optimise your website.

Whitehat and Blackhat are terms you will hear a lot in the SEO world and, although nowadays the line is often blurred between the two, they refer to very different ways of optimising a website for search engine results.

Whitehat generally refers to methods of optimisation that are above board, so to speak. Often this means conforming to the search engines guidelines and providing services that optimise the website for both the search engines and the users. The two go hand in hand, as usability is ultimately what the search engines are looking for.

Whitehat methods if applied correctly will improve your rankings and help to create a strong, secure SEO campaign.
Blackhat refers to methods of optimisation designed to trick the search engines. Despite search engines being able to do extremely complicated things, they do have their limitations and there are ways to exploit them.

Blackhat SEO quite often consists of methods that make the website look unappealing to users and ultimately look spammy. Examples of Blackhat SEO tactics are doorway pages, keywords stuffing and spammy link exchanges. These are examples of negative ranking factors which are checked for whenever we take over a client’s website to ensure they have not been employing these methods.

With search engines constantly improving their algorithms, Blackhat techniques often only provide short term results but more often than not are discovered and the sites penalised for employing them. This can lead to a reduction in the search engine rankings or even a complete ban.

At Navaro we only practise Whitehat SEO, we work closely with clients to ensure that rankings are achieved through ethical methods that are designed to get websites to the top and keep them there.