Grey Black & White Hat
White hat SEO's adhere to the letter of the search engine guidelines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and black hat SEO's will use any method they can to promote their site while trying to avoid getting banned. Grey Hats are in between using the best from both.
Black Hat:
So what sort of things constitute Black Hat SEO? There are three main areas where black hat SEO's operate.
The most common area is hidden text which is text that is embedded in the html code and seen by the search engines but not seen by website visitors. That gets your site banned.
The second area is showing one page to the search engines and a different page to humans. This is called cloaking and one method in particular is used almost exclusively, it is called IP cloaking. Here a software switch monitors the IP address of a user and compares it to a database of known Search Engine IP addresses. If the IP address is not recognized as belonging to a Search Engine the user is switched to pages designed for human consumption. If the IP address is determined to be from a search engine it is allowed to proceed to pages that have been specially designed for search engines only. This will also get your site removed from Google. If you want to know more about this technique you can read about commercial software available for IP cloaking at KloakIt and fantomas.
The third area of operation is content generation. Here the black hat SEO takes content (freely available articles from a database for example) and uses software to rewrite them automatically to produce original and unique keyword rich content for the search engines. Content generation is even offered on external servers like TurboSM and it has now become possible to generate millions of pages for thousands of domains with very little effort. However, Grey Hat site building is now taking over from the look of this product here.
Black Hat is to be avoided by anyone looking for long term income from advertising. Your site will be removed from the search engines within weeks. Leaving you to keep making more sites even faster to stay ahead of the game. Meanwhile the Black Hat sites just keep cramming the Internet with millions of junk pages.
White Hat:
See Example below of building a White Hat site.
Grey Hat:
Grey Hat techniques are useful for small business owners or anyone interested in producing income from their site quickly.
It takes the best of both worlds. Utilizing automatic site generation software it is possible to build new sites quickly and start earning money almost immediately. Unlike White Hat which may take months or years to make any cash, if ever!
There is nothing wrong in short circuiting the site manufacturing process and putting the whole thing on automatic, while you sip Martini's on some beautiful beach. While others labour away each day, painfully building page by page, indexing, submitting to search engines, making site maps and waiting..........
Where the major problem exists is the content and how to integrate money making ads into the generated pages.
This is where Grey Hat technology makes all the difference. Firstly, it incorporates real articles about real things that real people will read. Secondly, it can automatically integrate any affiliate advertising, google Adsense or other 'click' ads and place them on the right page in the right place for maximum effect. And, do it completely on auto-pilot each and every hour of each and every day.
Basically, Grey Hat is to web sites as Henry Ford is to cars. It brings mass production to site manufacturing.
Example:
The following is completely true and factual, only the domain names have been omitted for obvious reasons. it gives a perfect illustration of using White or Grey Hat techniques.
In July 2005 we decide to build a travel site using a good TLD name owned since 1999. It took some 3 months of dedicated hard work to build and another 3 months of titivating and adding some affiliate advertising. By the end of 6 months of laborious work we had this great site full of original travel content spread over around 600 pages. It was now January and not a single penny had been earnt!
Each day we added things that would help increase the quality of the site. We spent ages optimising pages for search engines and submitting. Then it happened!! In March (8 months later) we made our first affiliate ad commission. The site now produces about 1000 earnings per month and growing slowly.
Okay, you may say. That's not bad, even if it took nearly a year. But now look at the next example.
Two months ago, we started using different technology based on Grey Hat. Using a good auto site generator and Article Maker from WebCPG, we built 30 sites of around 200 pages each in about 5 days. Each site was automatically SEO honed to perfection. The content was factual, structured and informative and exactly in context with the page title. Context sensitive affiliate and Google ads were automatically built into each page along with graphics.
The site maps were built and uploaded, Google pinged and submitted to search engines ALL AUTOMATICALLY. Not only that, new pages were scheduled for automatic upload and submission on a weekly basis, making some of the sites now with over 500 pages. RSS feeds were automatically added and existing page content was regularly updated.
In the first two weeks, these brand new sites started producing real money. Now, two months later they have produced over $1200 from Google Adsense alone! More importantly, this is increasing around 5% daily as the sites get better known in the search engine stats.
So in comparing White and Grey Hat sites, there is no comparison. One is hard slog, but you may get there in the end, if your very fortunate though many are not. The other is a guaranteed money earner, from month one and, its totally automated. Leaving you time to enjoy your earnings.
While we shall still build the occasional 'work of art' site, from now on all our efforts are on Grey Hat production of quick quality sites that make money that we shall have much more time to enjoy.
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