White Hat Seo

People talk about white hat seo and black hat seo all the time in the search engine optimization industry, what do they mean? Specifically, terms like white hat seo sound like they apply to hackers and malicious virus programmers, why are they being appled to the advertising industry?

This is a great question, and as I have read everything I can find related to white hat seo I mostly see confusion and misconception. There seems to be a great deal of fear out there related to not being a white hat SEO if you are a consultant in this space. You would hate for something bad to happen to your clients web site, or worse, the performance in the search engines to suffer significantly.

I've looked to Google for definitions of white hat seo, but this has not been great. Sure, they have guidelines for webmasters and everyone should read them. They offer some helpful information on what is considered "okay" and what is not considered white hat seo. But they are also have a number of very vague statements such as "don't have multiple sites with substantially duplicate content." Well, what does "substantially duplicate content" mean? If I run two blogs about running where we discuss different running shoes, is that substantially duplicate content?

In the end, the term white hat seo is not helpful. FIrst off, it was stolen from the hacker community and is really better suited to describe internet security. Second, I can't find a clear definition on what it is anyway. One of my favorite quites is: "more and more white hat seo is nothing." I wish I had the link for you, but I laughed out loud when I read that.