Why White Hat SEO means good Local SEO

Google and Bing are big fans of ‘white hat’ or ethical SEO, and both strongly discourage ‘black hat’ SEO. But local SEO practices aren’t always black or white. Our focus in this post is on the differences between each practice, and how each might affect your local SEO performance.

Firstly some background...

What are the origins of 'white hat' and 'black hat' SEO?

This terminology, adopted by various verticals including the search industry, derives from Western movies where the protagonists tended to wear white hats, and the antagonists wore black. In other words 'white hat' = the good guys who tend to follow the rules, and 'black hat' = those who go against them.

'Grey hat' SEO falls somewhere in between, i.e. a mix of black and white SEO practices - or simply the use of tactics that may be considered black hat in the future.

The difference between each of these ultimately relates to whether or not your SEO practices are being applied in the spirit of the SEO rules.

But who sets the rules for SEO?

In the absence of a governing body for the search industry, it's the search engines who decide the conditions by which websites get to feature - and how they’re ranked.

And over the years the major search engines have developed their algorithms to combat any practices that may deliver unhelpful (or even dangerous) search results.

Google for instance is quite clear within its webmaster guidelines, and its Penguin, Panda and Payday algorithm changes reflect these. Bing similarly provides its own webmaster guidelines to help inform us what is and isn't deemed acceptable.

What is White Hat SEO?

Google frowns upon manipulating search results by trying to rank sites higher than they deserve. That’s what black hat SEO is. White hat SEO is SEO tends to avoid these shenanigans.

In some ways, white hat SEO is easy – it just involves playing by the rules. In other ways, it’s hard to do right.

Google’s developer documentation has a section on white hat SEO. It explains ways to avoid black hat SEO, and it provides some guidelines for what it considers to be white hat SEO. Here’s some of what they say:

Provide high-quality content that answers the user’s query without tricks or manipulation.
Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don’t do sneaky redirects from other domains.
Get user consent before redirecting from another domain.

In a nutshell, in Google’s eyes, white hat SEO attempts to do good things to benefit a website’s SEO in a way that Google likes.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO involves tricking search engines into ranking a site higher than it deserves. In Google’s eyes, it involves sites that are trying to manipulate search results.

The developer documentation Google has on black hat SEO goes into more detail about how Google defines black hat SEO.

Here’s some of what they say:

Sites that attempt to trick Google’s algorithms.
Sites that attempt to trick search engines into visiting them.
Sites that attempt to trick users into clicking on links.
Sites that attempt to manipulate rankings.

Black hat SEO is trying to game the system, and Google strongly advises against that.

What are the risks of each?

Grey and black hat local SEO techniques may well work in the immediate term, but you run the risk of being penalised later - either when your practices are reported, or the rules change.

Unfortunately following the rules doesn't always work, and it's the same with white hat SEO. If you're in a competitive space and others aren't playing by the rules you may not rank well until others are penalised.

But with white hat SEO, even though the process may be slower, you will have a greater chance of performing well over time. By focusing on a human audience and following search engine guidelines, in the long term you're going to see a real and sustained return on your investment.