White Hat, Gray Hat, Black Hat, and Asshat SEO: What’s the Difference?

Today’s question is: what is the difference between white hat SEO, gray hat SEO, black hat SEO and asshat SEO?

Well, that is a great question.

So white hat SEO basically assumes that you are always doing SEO techniques that are in compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

These guidelines say that any technique that falls under this list of guidelines is something that will not cause your site to get an algorithmic or manual penalty.

And you can do them on Google for ever and ever without repercussions, then gray hat…

SEO is more of a blend between white hat SEO and black hat SEO.

While it’s not exactly white hat in the purest sense, it’s also not all black hat in the purest sense.

And it usually includes more aggressive techniques that are borderline between white hat and black hat and are also borderline as being not in compliance with Google’s webmaster guidelines.

So this is important to consider simply because that you don’t want to run afoul of Google and get your site penalized or even worse, banned if you use the wrong techniques.

So you always want to make sure that if you’re using something that is more gray hat, that you don’t dive into the more black hat areas.

Now, black hat techniques are all these techniques that are against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

They are not illegal.

They are not going to land you in jail or anything.

But they could land your website into a dilly of a pickle in terms of penalties, manual actions, stuff like that.

So, very important to consider the black hat techniques that any SEO may or may not use when they are actually doing SEO on your site.

And the asshat SEO is generally a spammer that tends to do things like point thousands upon millions…

of bad links to your site in order to knock it off the SERPS.

They steal your content. They will do everything possible in order to game the system and run afoul of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

But also they run afoul of human decency in terms of being a competitor.

So it’s really something that you want to have a distinction on, because if you don’t pay attention to these particular things, then you may end up doing some more harm to your site than good.

That’s it for today’s Ask an SEO Episode 10.

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This is Brian Harnish signing off. Have a great day!!