White hat SEO – black hat SEO – penalties, bans and everything you need to know before you start optimizing your website
"Are you sure you only do white hat SEO? " "I heard link building is black hat SEO." "Do you follow Google's SEO guidelines?" These are just a few examples of the questions we get asked about black hat SEO and white hat SEO. There are a lot of myths and stereotypes surrounding this division, and it's high time to dispel them.
Does Google like SEO?
It's important to be clear: every SEO is an attempt (more or less successful) to outsmart Google's search engine algorithm, with the underlying goal of presenting the positioned website to web crawlers as highly attractive and relevant to a certain pool of search queries. In practice, this translates to an attempt to manipulate results. Therefore, SEO specialists' actions will not be approved by Google. Therefore, SEO also carries the risk of Google penalizing the website using this service. We do not hide this information from our clients – this is clearly stated in the SEO agreement.
What is problematic about positioning?
Google frowns on any actions intended to influence how a website is perceived by search engine spiders. It doesn't matter whether you're adding new text, updating meta tags, generating an updated sitemap.xml file, or acquiring links from valuable websites that lead to your website – as long as you do it with the intention of improving your ranking in search engine results. Logically, whether a website is positioned or not depends on the motivation to make the changes. This is, admittedly, a rather vague and debatable criterion.
Linking a website isn't included in webmaster recommendations. Therefore, adding any links with the intention of improving search engine rankings is inconsistent with Google's webmaster guidelines. Consequently, the only approved practices are modifications to the website's code and work on developing the website's content. In practice, however, linking is a crucial element of an SEO specialist's work, sometimes determining a top 10 position. It's important to be aware, however, that even a link placed on a prestigious and well-known website, in an article presenting the company's achievements, could theoretically be considered inappropriate linking by Google.
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How does this relate to black and white hat SEO?
Legend has it that there's a good kind of white hat SEO—approved by Google and boiled down to adding new content to a website—and a bad kind of SEO , which is black and defies Google's rules . The division into black and white hats is meant to evoke the world of Westerns and the headgear worn by good heroes and villains.
As we've already stated, there's no such thing (yet) as good SEO that Google approves. There are no guidelines for SEO specialists. There's Google Search Console – guidelines for webmasters (the tool's target audience was clearly indicated by its previous name, Google Webmaster Tools) that suggest what a well-built website should look like. There's no list of prohibited SEO practices – some are effective and some are ineffective. However, all of them can be considered manipulation – if implemented with that intent.
There's no such thing as black and white SEO. This distinction has a marketing dimension. It's not even fair to say it's a simplification for the layman. These terms tend to obscure the picture.
So what are these penalties from Google for?
Websites, not just those with SEO , can be penalized by Google. Google penalties don't necessarily have to be related to the SEO team's incompetence or overreach. Sites that have been hacked, for example, are at risk of being removed from the Google index. Google penalties are divided into manual and algorithmic. Information about a manual penalty and the reason for it can be found in the Google Search Console. Therefore, it can be assumed that a penalty is issued for something a good webmaster shouldn't impose on their website. In the context of this penalty, corrective action can be taken and the wrongdoing can be forgiven. An algorithmic penalty is a more difficult case. The components of the Google algorithm aren't public, so the cause of the problem isn't handed to you on a silver platter. Nor can you take action that will directly resolve it. You have to patiently wait for algorithm changes that are beneficial to your website and, of course, address the source of the problem in advance.
Removing a manual penalty from a website can take up to two years. Just because the penalty no longer appears in the Google Search Console doesn't mean the site will easily advance in search engine results. Google's crawlers are persistent, and it's possible for a site with a history penalty to climb in the rankings until it stops, for example, in the top 20 results, ceasing to respond to SEO efforts. It can even take four years for a site to reach the top 10 after the penalty is removed. Furthermore, not every penalized site has such a happy ending. Sometimes, the best solution is to change the domain. However, this solution is difficult to recommend to large and well-known brands.
We know from experience that websites that have repeatedly changed SEO companies are at "risk ." Short-term contracts (around 3-6 months) often result in very aggressive, risky link building and significant fluctuations in link counts.
The SEO specialist's knowledge and experience allow them to propose actions that help, not harm, the website, even though they still "manipulate Google search engine results." It's also worth noting that in Verseo's six-year history, no website has been penalized as a result of the actions of our SEO specialists.
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Summary
The above article covers the following topics:
- compliance of SEO activities with Google algorithms,
- ambiguity of Google's rules regarding optimization activities and the risks associated with link building,
- the conventional division of SEO into white hat and black hat and its limited application in practice,
- Google's mechanisms for penalizing websites, including manual and algorithmic penalties.
