Explaining the major differences between the two and how to avoid Google blacklisting your site.
In order to understand the difference between White Hat SEO and its counterpart you’ll first need to know that these two popular methodologies of SEO do meet at a single point where the line is blurred between the two.
There are certain SEO techniques that 10 years ago were all the rage like repeating keywords and phrases through keyword stuffing that were viable tools, when all that mattered was coming up top in search results. Nowadays however that’s the last thing a viable internet property would want to do. It could hurt your image and Google Pagerank if abused.
Keyword stuffing has evolved, good SEO’d sites are now creating coherent human readable content that can inform the user while at the same time providing the search engine with keyword reliable content that doesn’t dizzy the user with marketing junk. There is a fine line though that as internet marketing professionals we need to be aware of.
Writing content shouldn’t be about SEO, first and foremost we need to write for the user of the site. The user and Google will disengage interest if what otherwise informative text is littered with subtle spam. A perfect example of this can be found when doing a search for the ending of inception. The first site that comes up provides a lot of details concerning the ending, the first few paragraphs talk much about the same thing but re-written slightly. This is not the way to engage a user, too many sites are grounded on loose content and cool user interfaces in order to draw users to ads or signing up for networked sites. This I believe should fall under the category of a Black Hat techniques based on the idea that many sites out there are answering simple questions in the most verbose way possible in order to fool the search engines and waste your precious time.