White Hat vs. Black Hat - High Risk and Low Risk Tactics
At a recent SMX Conference, Matt Cutts (head of Google Web Spam) gave great examples of Black Hat and White Hat tactics as either high risk or low risk. Here are some blackhat/whitehat tactics and their relative risk factors:
| Topic | High Risk "Black Hat Tactics" | Low Risk "White Hat Tactics" |
| Cloaking | Showing different content to different users based on user-agent(i.e. Googlebot) | Showing the same content to all users |
| Doorway Pages | Little or no useful content pages meant to rank well for a specific keyword set and then funnel traffic to a specific page | Useful/Unique/Benefitial content meant to rank well for a specific keyword set. |
| Link Bait | Creating stories that are blatantly false merely to bait people into linking to your site | Creating unique, beneficial, and interesting stories that allow web masters an editorial choice (informed choice) to link to the content. |
| Widget Bait | Creating a widget that has
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| Search Results in Search Results | Compiles a list of links where the person has to click again before they get to the real content they were looking for | Provides content that is what the user was looking for |
Trust and credibility is a limited commodity on the Internet and is much easier to lose than gain. Higher risk items can quickly lose your credibility and cause your site to be banned from the search engines. With more and more SEOs working inhouse on their own company website, higher risk tactics are just not an option.