Exploring White Hat vs Black Hat Link Building Techniques

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If you are a lover of SEO, you must have come across content like the black hat, gray hat, and white hat link building or strategies. The internet is evolving day by day and search engines such as Google continue to update its search engine algorithms and guidelines to reduce unethical black hat backlinks in link building. 

As a content marketer in the digital space, you should be able to know the correct link building tactics to embark on to avoid penalties from Google. Understanding these hat link building will help you follow the right guidelines to achieving an organic and effective SERP ranking for your content.

You don’t need to worry if you are new to SEO or as a site owner, you want to know how to organically boost your pages. This article explains the Do’s and Don’ts of creating link building practices.

What is White hat link building?

This is an ethical link building technique that follows Google search engine guidelines for ranking purposes. This practice is a sustainable method of grooming a website’s authority and credibility. Although it might require a long term to see the effect of a white hat link, site owners use high quality backlinks to navigate content for the website’s search engine rankings.

The benefits of this white hat link building tactics include:

• It reduces the risk of Google penalties by strictly following stipulated rules 
• It builds a log term organic and sustainable search engines results 
• It’s built trust and credibility for online users and Google search engines.
• It increases conversions and sales and profits 
• It attracts more visitors by improving website authority through high quality backlinks.

What is Gray Hat link Building?

This is a combination of both white hat and black hat link building to increase search rankings. It is both an artificial and organic way of gaining backlinks. Unlike the black hat, it has a lower risk of getting penalized by Google. Although, some webmasters use this strategy as an escape route from Google penalty; they are more likely to face the punishment when there is an algorithmic change.

What is Black Hat Link Building?

This is the use of unethical link building techniques to rank on search engine result pages. Black hat SEO tactics are a manipulative method of gaining black hat backlinks that go against Google webmaster rules. An example of these black hat SEO techniques are: buying and selling links, using link farms, private blog networks, link forums, and broken link building technique for website search engine rankings. This can cause damage to your website page and ruin your reputation. There are benefits associated with black hat link building:

• It can provide short-term result 
• Require less effort, time, and resources in creating a link building campaign

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Black hat link building strategies to avoid

It can be tedious to know which strategy goes against Google’s webmaster guidelines, however, we have laid down black hat techniques that are against website’s ranking. Most website owners carry out this unintentional act for engagement or website traffic. Here is a list of unethical measures to avoid:

Link Schemes 

Any link that violates Google search rankings guidelines is link schemes. And as such any practices used to manipulate backlinks are part of the scheme too. These black hat tactics include:

• Creating unnatural links 
• Excess linking from one website to another 
• Taking paid links as a contract service 
• Buying backlinks 

A practical example of this link scheme can be seen in links with optimized anchor text in content distributed to another website. Also forum comment with a link in the post.

Scraped content 

Copying content from other websites may result in copyright policy issues. Plagiarized content is a red flag in link building and may result in Panda penalties which Google algorithm can detect. Creating an original piece for your website helps to give users the value needed to drive organic traffic to your website page. An example of scraped content 

• A site that adds images or videos from another website without any usefulness 
• A website that republishes content from other pages by adjusting written text or synonyms. 

Keyword Stuffing 

This involves the misuse of keywords and phrases just to rank on search engine results page. This can a pose risk to a website by degrading and causing a bad user experience. Example Of Keyword Stuffing include the repetition of block text, a content that contains a list of directories that ranks for a web page. insufficient keyword research can cause misplacement or misused in blog posts or website page.

Sneaky Redirects 

Sending a visitor on your page to a different URL that doesn’t match the requested page is a big time violation and can cause your website page to expire or be penalized. It’s okay to redirect users when you are changing your website address to a new one. Other than that a sneaky redirect is deceptive to search engines, as Googlebot indexes page while taking users to the redirect. An example is when users receive a page on a PC while mobile users get redirected to a different website.

Cloaking 

This is showing users or search engines a different content or URL or it involves sharing one version of a web page to the search engine and another to users. The page shown to search engine crawlers has a lot of keywords and backlink used to rank while users are shown high quality content.

However, cloaking can be done in a legitimate way such that cloaked concern can appear in different languages for users to grasp depending on the user’s location.

Spamming Blog Comments 

This is a black hat backlinks tactics that boost the site in an unscrupulous manner. It involves dropping comment links to websites for promotional purposes. A WordPress website can be added with excessive spammy low quality links that violates search engine guidelines.

Top White Hat Link Building Techniques in Content strategies 

White hat strategies involve creating high quality links for a website’s rankings. This is an effective search engine optimization measure that fit into Google webmaster guidelines. White hat SEO tactics to follow for a site’s ranking include:

Engage in Guest Blogging

This involves posting content on someone else’s page for backlink optimization. This white hat link building can be tricky and requires an expert to ascertain links gotten from an authoritative website. Creating meaningful content that is valuable to readers helps boost credibility of your website page.

You can request a dofollow link to your resource page from your website since it’s a niche-specific piece. To secure this backlink you need to:

• Identify which blog accept guest posting 
• Reach out on their social media handles or website page.
• Provide a high quality article before you submit, then in return, you get a backlink profile.

You can reach out to publishers or editors for guest posting content. Adjusting your crafted content such that it relates to news information. Some press release sites can help you develop backlinks that will drive traffic organically. For instance, a Fintech company starting up will likely opt to do a press release to a publishing platform.

Using a free Publishing service will help journalists and experts source stories, thereby providing backlinks from a reputable website like Forbes. The benefit of using press outreach for white hat link building is as follows:

• It establishes your brand as an entity, putting your name out to millions of potential clients, and provide them with answers to their queries 
• It diversifies your backlink as a powerful ranking tool 
• It exposes your brand in an advanced way by increasing visibility.

Broken link Building 

It’s possible for links to wear out and break with time, this could be as a result of broken links, a change in ownership, or the domain shutting down entirely. Tools such as site explorer are used to check for broken links, or you can search keywords that are inscribed into anchor text to see the link you can take action for.

Building a Sustainable Network 

Obtaining a high website backlink is a plus for white hat link building. It fosters a unique connection with brands related to your industry, this gives you many platforms to build a reputable profile.

This is totally different from a private Blog network which is a black hat link building technique. This white hat building network improves websites and an organic way of pitching to websites in exchange of backlinks to content value. This content strategy can boost your SEO and increase your site metrics. It can also increase your outreach and support wesite owners by gaining conversion.

Unlinked brand mentions 

Engaging in brand mentions helps to increase popularity and awareness. Creating links with link building services to produce content such as images, infographics, etc. Can get your brand mentioned on a website page organically. This can favor link building through referral traffic and relevant links are shared among mentioned brands.

Conclusion 

It is not easy to keep up with Google update algorithms, nevertheless, you should be aware of the right hat link building techniques to carry out in your campaign. White hat SEO is the best practice to gain natural links: while building links it is necessary to provide relevant content for search engine users.