White Hat vs Black Hat SEO
Digital Marketing
By Greg Crowell
There Are Two Approaches to SEO, Choose Wisely
Google processes 6.5 million searches per minute. If you want to appear in the search results and get significant web traffic, you need SEO. Digital marketers, optimizers and developers generally take one of two approaches: white hat (ethical, long-term strategies) and black hat (risky, short-term tactics).
Examples of Black Hat SEO
- Create automatically generated content
- Create text and links that are hidden from the user, but visible to search engines
- Stuff a page full of keywords yet provide minimal worthy content
- Implement sneaky javascript redirects
- Buy links to your site from “link farms” and link building schemes
- Create duplicate content, typically with slight variations in location information to improve local search results
- Automate queries to Google, making them think searches you rank for are more popular than they really are
- Copy popular content on the internet, reword it, then publish it on your site
Examples of White Hat SEO
- Improve your users’ experience on your website
- Add original, relevant content and valuable services
- Build legitimate backlinks (links outside of your site that point to yours)
- Provide technical solutions to address site issues
- Make your site easy to navigate for people and search crawlers alike
- Use appropriate and succinct meta titles and descriptions to increase CTR (Click Through Rate)
- Improve internal linking
- Improve local results by optimizing your Google Business Profile
- Add schema.org structured data to help search engines, voice assistants, and AI services understand your content
Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO implements unethical tactics aimed to deceive search engines and manipulate results pages. They may yield short-term success, but Google is constantly improving its ability to identify sites that are practicing deceit. When these sites are discovered, they are penalized, and in some cases, completely blacklisted from appearing in search results.
The Fruit of Black Hat SEO
Large companies who have been caught breaking the rules, like JC Penny, Forbes, and Overstock.com, have the resources to get the attention of Google management and seek remediation. Smaller companies who are allotted traffic crushing penalties will have a harder time repairing the damage done. The penalties can erase months or years of hard work in an instant, and harm your reputation.
White Hat SEO
White hat SEO improves your search results status by making practical, effective and honest improvements to your pages, all within Google’s webmaster guidelines.
Most of what gets you ranked on search engines is valuable content and services that people want to find. Think of a good SEO professional as someone who finds a diamond in the rough. They pick it up, dust it off, make a few expert cuts, then take it to the market where its value can be fully appreciated.
The Fruit of White Hat SEO
Here are some white hat SEO winners of 2025:
Canva
Canva is a software suite of design tools that runs in the browser or as an app. They began doing business in 2013, and rank for 4.9 million keywords, driving almost 100 million users to their website per month. 1.5% of their traffic is non-branded, meaning they get ~150,000 users per month that weren’t looking for them, but were perhaps searching “how to create a logo”. Their 100 million monthly hits are valued at $31.2 million dollars. Canva’s current valuation is $40 billion dollars.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a writing assistant that helps users avoid spelling mistakes, typos, and improves written communications with its live-editing help. They rank for 1.1 million keywords, which drives 19.7 million visitors to their website every month. 4.2% of their traffic is non-branded, and their 19.7 million visitors are valued at 4.9 million dollars. Grammarly has a valuation of $13 billion dollars.
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