Gray Hat SEO is a type of SEO that is riskier than White Hat SEO, but it might or might not get your site banned from search engines and sites that work with them.
Most of the time, Gray Hat SEO practices don’t fit into either the Black Hat or White Hat categories because there aren’t clear rules about them. You’ll find the answers to the following questions in this tutorial:
What IS Gray Hat SEO?
Gray Hat SEO is hard to explain. SEO Consultant John Andrews says that Gray Hat SEO is not something in between Black Hat and White Hat.
Instead, it is “the practice of tactics/techniques that remain unclear in published material from Google, and for which reasonable people could disagree on how the tactics support or go against the spirit of Google’s published guidelines.”
Why is SEO Gray Hat Important?
Gray Hat SEO is important to understand because it could help your site rank higher without any bad effects or cost you thousands of dollars in lost traffic if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Google’s rules and best practices could stop smart people from coming up with new ideas and thinking outside the box. This rule isn’t always in the best interest of search marketers or even of the people doing the searching.
Gray Hat SEO also changes over time. Something that was considered Gray Hat one year might be called Black or White Hat the next, so it’s important for search marketers to keep up with the latest classifications.
Should You Use Grey Hat SEO Techniques?
You don’t have much to gain by getting on Google’s bad side, so if you’re not sure if a certain method goes against Google’s rules or not, it’s probably best to avoid it. Every marketer has to figure out the risk vs. reward for themselves, but since Google’s algorithms are getting stricter all the time, your business will be safest if you only use white hat SEO.
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