Types of SEO

There are 3 types of SEO depending on the techniques and strategies used: White Hat SEO, Black Hat SEO and Grey Hat SEO.

These three types are classified according to whether or not they follow Google’s best practices. But before getting into the subject, what are Google’s best practices?

Google’s best practices

Google’s search engine started out as an algorithm nobody knew anything about, but over time it has evolved and today it works with systems that are far more advanced and harder to understand.

The most experienced people, through extensive testing and investment in experiments, know small tricks that can give you an advantage and help you reach the top positions by «tricking» the search engine.

Google has no interest in this, since it has to offer users the best possible answer. If it allowed itself to be manipulated, people would take advantage of it to show whatever they wanted instead of what the user is looking for, and it would lose credibility. As a result, it would lose its users.

Google’s best practices boil down to creating very good, exclusive content so that other sites want to link to it, but this is very difficult, practically a titanic task.

You can find these best practices here:

• https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.es/es/es/webmasters/docs/guia_optimizacion_motores_busqueda.pdf
• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=es

White Hat SEO

White Hat SEOs are those who follow Google’s best practices, or break them as discreetly as possible, since certain tasks usually require breaking them.

A fairly clear example is buying links, which is almost always done in any project.

They will follow the rest of the best practices to the letter, but if you stick to Google’s best practices, you may well end up falling behind other companies, especially in highly competitive sectors.

Grey Hat SEO

Grey Hat SEO sits in the middle ground. These are more advanced techniques that carry a certain risk of penalisation, but the benefits have a very large positive impact.

If Google doesn’t catch you, that’s good: you can easily overtake the competition. But if it knows you are using this kind of practice, depending on how you use it, it may penalise your website. In other words, it depends on whether it runs parallel to Google’s interests.

Today there are many competitive sites that use this kind of practice (not all of them), but it requires a certain amount of knowledge and experience, as well as knowing what you are doing.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO consists of techniques that usually lead to penalties for our website. The aim is to exploit vulnerabilities in the search engine in order to rank or attract traffic.

There may be cases where it takes a while for this kind of practice to get you penalised, but generally the penalty comes fairly quickly, depending on the practice and the search engine’s updates.

The aim is to build sites with a medium lifespan while you create others in parallel, exploiting the vulnerability until you get caught on one of the websites, and then you carry on with the rest (or until an update comes along and they all get hit).

They don’t necessarily have to penalise you. It all depends on the sector you are in, whether there are websites that match the search intent of the keywords or not, and whether the other websites are doing the same.

What is the best type of SEO?

I don’t think there is a better or worse type of SEO, rather different goals, but it is important to learn from and experiment with all of these approaches, as this will give us a great deal of knowledge and experience to create far more advanced and better techniques.

My recommendation is to have several sites to experiment with and not put all your eggs in one basket. Use one for more White Hat techniques, another for grey and another for black.

If what you want is to learn, try to look for businesses with little SEO competition. If you are not sure, you can always lean on and consult other people in the SEO community.

SEO and Digital Marketing professionals are most active on Twitter and LinkedIn, so I recommend creating an account if you don’t have one yet.

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When several types of SEO have to be coordinated within the same strategy, a Full Stack SEO consultancy approach helps you prioritise without treating each area as an isolated task.