Grey-Hat SEO Tactics

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics

The SEO tactics that fall in the grey area between legitimate tactics and search engine spam are considered to be "grey-hat" SEO Tactics. They include tactics such as cloaking, paid links, duplicate content and a number of others. Unless you are on the correct side of this equation these tactics are not recommended.

Grey-Hat SEO Tactics:

• Cloaking
  White Side - There are times when cloaking is considered a legitimate tactic by users and search engines alike. Basically, if there is a logical reason why you should be allowed to present different information to the search engines than the visitor (if you have content behind a "members only" area for example) you are relatively safe. Another example of a site legitimately using cloaking, is when the site is mainly image-based such as an art site. In this event, provided that the text used to represent the page accurately defines the page and image(s) on it, this could be considered a legitimate use of cloaking.
  
  Black Side - This tactic is considered to be very risky and it is recommended that you contact each search engine, present your reasoning, and allow them the opportunity to approve it's use.
• Duplicate Content
  Black Side - Duplicate content on the web has increasingly became a significant problem for both search engines as well as search engine users alike with the same or similar sitesdominating the top positions in the search engine results pages.
  
  To address this problem many search engines have added filters that seek out pages with the same or very similar content and eliminate the duplicate. Even at times when the duplicate content is not detected by the search engines it is often reported by competitors and the site's rankings penalized.
  
  White Side - There are times when duplicate content is considered legitimate by both search engines and visitors and that is on resource sites. A site that consists primarily as an index of articles on a specific subject-matter will not be penalized by posting articles that occur elsewhere on the net, though the weight it may be given as additional content will likely not be as high as a page of unique content.

Posted in: Grey-Hat SEO Tactics