White hat SEO is the work that makes your site the better result for a search: pages that say what your customers type and answer it, a site Google can crawl, and mentions from sites people actually read. Black hat SEO makes a site look like that result without being it. The line is published: Google’s guidelines for SEO list the tactics that cross it, and a site that uses them “may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”
One test sorts any tactic
Ask what happens when Google sees exactly what the tactic is. A category page rewritten in your customers’ words keeps working when Google reads it closely, because being read closely is the point of it. A bought link, or a page for every town with the same text, works only while Google mistakes it for something else: a writer’s free choice, a genuinely local page. When a tactic depends on Google misreading it, it’s black hat, whatever the proposal calls it.
White hat and black hat tactics, side by side
Most tactics come in pairs: a version that makes the site better and a version that fakes it. From the outside they look alike, and in a monthly report both appear as the same line. White hat SEO software, a crawler or Search Console, finds what is wrong; it makes nothing white hat by itself.
| White hat | Black hat, and the policy it breaks |
|---|---|
| A page rewritten so its title, heading and text say what your customers search for | The search repeated until the page reads badlyKeyword stuffing |
| A redirect when a page moves or two pages merge into one | A redirect that sends visitors somewhere other than the page Google indexedSneaky redirects |
| A link from a supplier’s stockist list, a local paper or a trade association, which is white hat link building | A link bought to pass ranking credit, or traded for products or a reviewLink spam |
A paid placement whose link is marked rel="sponsored" | The same paid placement with a plain linkLink spam |
| A page for each town where you have a branch, staff or jobs to show | A page for each town with the same text and the name swappedDoorway abuse |
| One page for each question your buyers ask before they buy | Hundreds of generated pages written to catch searchesScaled content abuse |
| Details in tabs or accordions a visitor can open | Text in the background colour or pushed off screen, there for Google aloneHidden text and link abuse |
Grey hat tactics land on one side too
“Grey hat” is the name for tactics near the line: guest posts written around your keywords, links placed on blogs that sell posts to anyone, an expired domain rebuilt as a blog so it can link to you. The test places each of them. Google’s link spam policy names guest posts with optimized anchor text and posts that carry links in exchange for money, and its expired domain abuse policy covers a domain bought and filled with low-value content to manipulate rankings. A guest article written for the readers of a site your customers read, with a plain link to you, keeps working when Google looks at it closely. That one is white hat.
Does black hat SEO still work?
Sometimes, for a while. Google catches most of it automatically, with spam detection systems that include one it calls SpamBrain, and a human reviewer can add a manual action that drops some or all of a site from the results. When it’s caught, the site that carries the tactic pays, whoever sold it.
For a store or a service business that settles it. Your site holds your reviews, the links other sites gave you and Google’s record of which of your pages searchers chose. A throwaway site built to be burned can afford black hat. A business whose customers find it on Google can’t.
Ask for the work in one plain sentence
Before you pay for SEO, ask for each tactic in one literal sentence: which pages change on your site, which sites will link to you and why they would, and who pays whom. White hat work reads fine that way. A proposal that needs the words “white hat” to sound acceptable is avoiding that sentence.
Rerank’s white hat SEO services pass it: every change is made on your own site, and your monthly update names each page that changed and where it now ranks.