Too many hats

[webzilla]

Forgive my ignorance on the subject.

Could somebody please define "White Hat SEO", "Black Hat SEO", and any other shades or colors of SEO?

[diamondgrl]

Black Hats are the evil guys who use all kinds of trickery and slimy techniques to fool search engines into promoting their pages which are often worthless detritus that should be eliminated from the web. They are the web equivalent of email spammers.

White Hats use commonly accepted techniques to promote sites to the search engines. These techniques are well within the bounds of acceptability and involve no subterfuge or trickery.

[mark1615]

No offense, but I think he was asking for at least a working list of White Hat and Black Hat techniques. That would be interesting. I am sure that there are some Grey Hat techniquest that would spark a debate as to their acceptability.

[httpwebwitch]

black hat:
120 pages of spam keywords hidden in a CSS layer indented behind mexico, cloaked from the public but fed encouragingly to the bots

white hat:
calling your competitors by telephone and negotiating reciprocal link exchanges

grey hat:
finding old, forgotten Perl guestbooks with PR5 that don't escape HTML in comments, and putting things like iframes, meta refreshes and tightly packed linkspam on other people's pages

[diamondgrl]

httpwebwitch,

you have a pretty forgiving definition of grayhat techniques. those sound on the pretty black side of gray to me ...

[encyclo]

There's not really any such thing as "black hat" or "white hat" SEO, because the notion of "black hat" implicitly makes illusion to illegal activities, whereas SEO rarely falls into that category. Also, there is absolutely no correlation whatsoever between email spam and SEO.

Tactics aimed at attacking other sites directly (rather than optimizing yours) such as page-jacking, DDOS, etc. are most definitely unacceptable under any circumstances.

If you are promoting your site rather than attacking others, then you just need to decide your level of risk. The major search engines publish sets of vague guidelines, which if you choose to ignore, may increase the chance of your sites being excluded from their index.