Marketing Profs

Search engine optimizers typically label themselves as "white hat" or "black hat" to identify their basic philosophy, approach and methodology for SEO.

As with most things in life, SEO probably isn't as much "black" and "white" as a spectrum of gray. And, more importantly to marketers, the question isn't so much what's black and what's white but what impact can each approach have on your brand?

With that question in mind, let's explore several ways the opposite ends of the SEO spectrum can be defined in relation to each other, and how each of these practices can affect a Web site's resources and rankings in the search engines.

Rules/No Rules

One of the more popular ways to distinguish between the two is how they observe "the rules" set out by the search engines. White hats tend to see themselves as the "good guys," playing by the rules published by the search engines. Black hats take pride in their "there are no rules" approach to SEO—all's fair in love and war... and SEO.

Black hat optimizers say that as long as they're not doing anything literally illegal, just because the search engines don't like it doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't do it.

The question here becomes how to interpret the "rules." Black hat and white hat quickly blend to gray as soon as interpretation enters the discussion.

For example, white hat optimizers typically work to increase keyword relevance on a page by inserting the target keyword into the site's visible content. Purists would charge that that is not white hat, but rather sliding into the darker side of the spectrum because the optimizers worked to attract the search engineers. These purists say that any optimization is questionable because they reserve the white hat for "no" optimization.

Now let's move from this extreme example to a more common one: in-bound links and what hat you are wearing when you're trying to get them.