Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO

As earlier mentioned, white hat SEO is the most prominent practice to rank your site without facing the risk of a penalty from Google, even though things worked a bit differently in the early days of search engines.

For instance, When Google was just starting out; the number of links you could generate back to your website was one of the main search result indicators (if not the only one then). As it was figured out, PageRank was fundamentally built upon leveraging these backlinks; so, the more the number of backlinks your site got from external domains, the higher the PageRank it would experience.

Some people manipulated this in so many ways to drive tons of organic traffic to their sites while some deliberately came up with multiple websites so as to leverage the search engine juice injudiciously, even though that was then. Some bloggers even went as far as purchasing domains purposely to link back to their major websites and earn the traffic juice unjustly.

Unlike what matters most to Google these days, “User intent” wasn’t the focus of the then search engines, thus making searchers go frustrated without being served what they wanted. Those websites were only mindful of getting the traffic without user intent or user experience in mind.

In those days, search algorithms weren’t constantly updated as they are in search engines of today. In today’s search algorithms, you could get severely penalized for implementing the black hat SEO strategies, thus resulting in a total blackmailing of the particular site in SERPs or a drop in search engine rankings. So, when it comes to black hat vs. white hat SEO tactics, simply follow the latter and ignore the former.