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Gray Hat SEO techniques

Grey hat SEO techniques take more risks than white hat SEO techniques but aren’t likely to get your site banned from search engines (although a search engine penality could result).

They’re questionable SEO techniques but not in the same category as black hat SEO techniques. However, what’s considered gray hat SEO today might be black hat SEO next year. Rather than this led to the development of the website.

Grey Hat (or Gray Hat): Since the color gray is between black and white, logically Grey Hat SEO sounds like a label for the middle ground. But it’s not. Because White is pure white and grey is a shade of black, we have confusion. Some say Grey Hat is NOT White Hat and is just a shade of Black Hat. So let’s step away from the coor wheel and define Grey Hat as the practice of tactics/techniques which remain ill-defined by all that published material coming out of Google, and for which reasonable people (not White Hat SEOs, mind you, but “reasonable people”) could disagree on how the tactics support or contrast with the “spirit” of Google’s published guidelines.

There are certain process of using gray hat techniques which are as follows:-

Cloaking
Cloaking is the practice wherein the web site owner provides information to the search engines which is different from what the site actually contains. Obviously, this is a practice that reeks of deception. However, there are certain cases when this practice can be deemed acceptable. For example, if the web site has content that is available only to members then it could be acceptable. Then again, this practice can very well be abused. That is the main reason cloaking is considered gray hat SEO.

Paid links
We all know how important links are for SEO. That is why it is quite understandable that the practice of buying links can become questionable. Purchasing links for advertising purposes is fine. However, if you purchase links solely because you want in link-popularity, then it could be considered shady. In fact, the suggestion is that you work on links to increase your traffic and just consider the increase in link-popularity as icing on top of the cake.

Duplicate content
Duplicate content can be considered legitimate in certain cases but rarely. For example, indexing and abstracting web sites may have duplicate content. In most cases, though, duplicate content is considered unacceptable.

WordStream is the perfect marriage of differentiation and adherence to guidelines. The software was created with Google’s terms and conditions in mind, but also to automate repetitive tasks to improve Quality Score, save time, and lower costs. These tools include:

Keyword Discovery Tool: With our SEO keyword tool, you can add some JavaScript to your website and the keyword software finds relevant keywords that people use to find your website–literally growing your keyword list as you sleep
Keyword Grouping Tool: This automatically organizes your keywords by relevance, a key component of a good Quality Score
Ad Text Tool: The Ad Text tool automatically populates your ad copy with appropriate keywords, making sure your creative is relevant to its Ad group

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Greyhat SEO Principles

Much has been made about blackhat SEO principles and, in general, greyhat SEO principles and techniques largely go unmentioned.The differences between black and white are obvious, but shades of grey begin to overlap and the line becomes blurred as to what is acceptable and what is not.

Ultimately you must rely on sound judgment and core design principles to protect you from possible damage should you cross over that thin line.

You would think that grey area would be sufficient enough that there wouldn’t be much trouble. But the issue is really one of human nature. If you examine the spectrum of gray – it varies from very near white to very near black. Because people are looking to get the most out of their SEO efforts (which can be very time consuming and costly) they are generally only operating in a small fraction of that grey spectrum – and it is in the dark grey to nearly black region that most operate in. It all comes down to risk and reward.

By intelligent design and understanding of SEO principles, SEO experts can design a site architecture which can allow for experimentation at different levels with different degrees of risk and still isolate those activities from impacting your money site. This is where an SEO expert is worth their weight in gold. You want to be able to walk that thin tightrope, but you also want to have a safety net below you so that if you fall, you don’t take down your core business site with you. This strategy is normally divided into “feeder” sites and “money” sites and involves the creation of many different easily created “feeder” sites for which more experimentation into greyhat traffic and SEO techniques may be explored.

As an example, let’s assume you have your primary business site (your money site) and you want to experiment with driving traffic via a greyhat approach. Rather than doing this experimentation on your money site, you would create one or more “feeder” sites. A feeder site can be very simplistic, such as a single page Squidoo lens or Hubpage. Frequently social media sites are used as feeder sites because of their ease of creation and because they get a lot of SEO juice (in other words, Google and the other search engines love them). Let’s assume that your business site is a PR3 site (Page Rank 3). You can increase its authority by linking from higher page rank sites back to yours and most of these social media sites are very high (PR6 and above) ranking sites. So if you were to create a few different Squidoo lens or Hubpages pointing page to your site and “feeding” traffic to it, not only would you increase traffic but also authority, relevance and page rank. It is important to note than the design of this architecture is crucial and you shouldn’t take this brief example as a blueprint, because it leaves out many vital details that you need to discuss with a credible SEO expert.

A key concept to understand when designed for greyhat experimentation is that Google does not penalize you for a blackhat site linking to your site. It does, however, penalize you big time if you link to a blacklisted site as it sees that as a credibility issue on your part. We can’t control who links to us, and therefore, Google can’t penalize us for that. So, greyhat experimentation would allow you to try out some different experiments on some of your feeder sites knowing that the worst case scenario would simply involve loosing that site and/or account. Keep in mind, many vital small details must be adhered to in order to insure the protection of your money site. Things that you wouldn’t normally think of, such as making sure your identity is not linked to all of these feeder sites or it will be easy for Google to tie them all together. Remember that greyhat techniques ten to me much closer to blackhat techniques than whitehat techniques, so you still need to treat them with the greatest of respect and caution. You simply cannot afford to jeopardize your money site under any circumstances.

Another example of a greyhat solution would be article or content “spinning”. Article spinning involves the automated generation of multiple unique versions of an article. So, you write it once, run it through a program and spit out dozens or hundreds of unique versions. This is done because the search engines give high preference to unique content. Article spinning can either be completely whitehat, greyhat or completely blackhat depending on how you do it. A blackhat version involves completely automated efforts that generally produce very poor results, but do it with minimal effort. Whitehat article spinning, would essentially me just writing dozens of unique articles – 100% safe, but very time consuming. Enter the greyhat approach. Greyhat article spinning software is pretty intelligent. It requires more time than a purely automated approach, but far less time than a complete article rewrite approach. So, for example, a greyhat article spinner may require you to provide two variations of every sentence in your article (thus twice as much work) but from those variations it may spin that article into dozens of unique combinations of content all of which will be very human legible and articulate since every word of it was written manually. Blackhat techniques often use synonym and thesaurus look up tables and automated text and phrase substitutions, etc… all of which generally lead to poor results.

Hopefully by now, you’ve seen the benefits and risks involved with greyhat SEO principles as well and can recognize the essential role that an SEO expert will play in hand crafting and designing an SEO friendly architecture for your site or network of sites.

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What is Grey Hat Seo??

Grey Hat (or Gray Hat): Since the color gray is between black and white,logically Grey Hat SEO sounds like a label for the middle ground.

But it’s not.Because White is pure white and grey is a shade of black, we have confusion.

Some say Grey Hat is NOT White Hat and is just a shade of Black Hat.

So let’s step away from the coor wheel and define Grey Hat as the practice of tactics/techniques which remain ill-defined by all that published material coming out of Google, and for which reasonable people (not White Hat SEOs, mind you, but “reasonable people”) could disagree on how the tactics support or contrast with the “spirit” of Google’s published guidelines.

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Are grey hat techniques really ethical?

How come when it comes to websites, we always look for the ones that have good content and are relevant to what we are looking for.However some website developers do not seem to understand that.

There are a wide range of SEO techniques that exist for increasing the ranking of a particular page. Some of these techniques are considered ethical, while some of them are not.

The techniques that are ethical are known as white hat techniques, where as the others are known as Black hat techniques. Many SEO experts use a combination of these techniques because they are easy to implement and they provide a considerable amount of success.

There are many white Hat SEO optimizing techniques that include META tags, putting keywords in URLs, submitting sites to directories, making sitemaps, obtaining links on related sites, and creating keyword-optimized content. These techniques allow the search engines to find relevant pages which people are looking for. Search engines promote such methods through services like Google Webmaster Tools. These techniques are being promoted on a large level, because these bring guaranteed results, however the major issue is that they are a little difficulty to achieve and are time consuming.

This is the reason that people have started opting for Black Hat SEO which includes methods like redirecting search engine “spiders” to different pages than human visitors see, mass-posting “spam” comments or putting lists of keywords at the end of each page in very small fonts. This brings the rank of the website higher in Search engine Result Pages (SERPS). Black hat methods reduce the quality of search engine results, which does not help, because the user would not visit your website again. The point that people miss is that one should design a website in accordance to the “user” and not the “Search engine”, because ultimately users will be using the website.

The difference between white hat and black hat lies in the fact that Black Hat SEO techniques are faster and easier to implement, but they always have the risk of causing search engines to downgrade.

Using white hat methods improperly can turn them into Black Hat techniques. Many companies and people say are using a combination of black hat and white hat techniques, generally termed as Grey hat SEO, which is again not the right way to go about things. For Instance: posting linked comments on related blogs is not that bad, however if you use software to submit huge quantities of identical comments is definitely a Black Hat techniques

All of us believe in the fact that “ Everything is fair in love and war” so many companies and SEO experts follow Grey hat techniques, which is just as bad as following black hat, because in any case one is not following what is called “ethical”. This does not hinder and affect in short term but adds up and hampers in the long run. By saying that grey hat is NOT totally black hat doesn’t really make it a complete ethical procedure. One needs to understand that limitations of something could become strong points of something else but that doesn’t guarantee that the other thing is very much right. So we can not really talk about success by hiding its failures. Using Grey or black hat is the same; it’s just that grey hat is a safer term.

White Hat SEO methods, if performed correctly will help you have a greater impact over the web in general. Everyday a new black hat technique is introduced over the internet because of which they are getting popular, but these techniques are unethical. The best way to get recognized over the internet is to use white hat techniques and hire the companies that follow them, if you follow unethical techniques then you will end up creating a website only for the search engine, which would not be of any use to you. Always create a website that is for the “user” and not for the search engine.

Even the most familiar idiom ‘by hook or by crook’ is also not justified from the darker perspective of SEO universe. On one side, some people using black hat SEO techniques to promote their brands or services is perfectly fine for their business just because they don’t care what methods they used and from where the business came in, so it proved to be ethical for them. But at the same time, they are quite unethical as well; cheating search engines and blocking succession routes of other competitors. So even if you are following unethical procedures for your own betterment (intentionally causing no harm to others), still you can not justify your stand because you may be unethical to someone, directly or indirectly.