What is Grey Hat SEO?
Grey hat SEO is a search engine optimization technique that combines black hat and white hat SEO techniques. Grey hat SEO tactics do not entirely go against Google Search Essentials guidelines to be considered black hat. However, they are not ethical enough to be considered white hat.
For example, a blogger may create high-quality content, which is a white hat SEO technique, but then buy backlinks to improve its position in search.
Grey hat SEO may also involve techniques that can be considered white hat or black hat SEO, depending on how they are assessed. For instance, if a blogger pays a site to publish a post with a link back to their own site, this practice could be viewed as guest blogging (a white hat SEO technique) or link buying (a black hat SEO technique).
While grey hat SEO techniques may offer short-term benefits, they can also carry the risk of search engine penalties if discovered.
Why is Grey Hat SEO Important?
Grey hat SEO can get Google to issue a manual action penalty against your site. If that happens, Google will demote your rankings or remove your site completely from search results pages.
This is particularly true for grey hat SEO techniques that contain black hat SEO components. For example, Google will penalize a site for link buying even if the link points to high-quality content.
In the case of spam, Google has clarified that its spam policies cover all forms of spammy content and link building methods, even if they are not explicitly listed in its spam policies.
As a rule, it is best to avoid grey hat SEO techniques. You should also take steps to avoid Google treating your white hat SEO as black hat SEO. For example, Google may mistake gated content without a subscription and paywalled content structured data for cloaking.
Examples of Grey Hat SEO Techniques
Grey hat SEO is not all white and black. Some grey hat SEO techniques combine black and white hat SEO, while others are not explicitly black hat SEO but are questionable enough not to be considered white hat either. Then, there are the grey hat SEO techniques that are just black hat SEO in disguise.
1 Paid Links
Link buying is a common black hat SEO technique in which a blogger pays to have links pointing to their site. However, paid links are not always clearly defined.
For instance, many bloggers engage in guest blogging, which involves contributing high-quality content to other sites in exchange for backlinks. Some sites, in return, require the blogger to pay a “fee” to publish their guest posts, which essentially turns them into sponsored posts.
While guest blogging and sponsored posts are white hat link-building methods, Google requires sites to include a rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow” link attribute to the links in such content. However, the site may not include them to their sponsored and guest posts, essentially turning them into paid links.
2 Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique in which a blogger repeats keywords more times than necessary within a single piece of content. The technique can vary greatly from site to site.
For example, it is usually so glaring on certain sites that the content would be unintelligible to a human reader and contain keywords from start to finish. Meanwhile, other sites could do it so subtly that the content remains readable even though it can still be identified as keyword stuffing.
However, some bloggers can stuff keywords into their content so perfectly that it is almost undetectable. The content would also be readable and appear natural. It is typically hard to identify these sorts of keyword stuffing, and a regular reader may pass it off as a regular article without realizing it is filled with keywords.
3 Negative SEO
Negative SEO is a technique wherein a blogger engages in black hat SEO activities but points the links at a competitor’s site. Malicious bloggers do this to hurt the site’s rankings and increase the chances of their content ranking higher on search results pages.
Google has mentioned that it does a lot of work to ensure negative SEO does not harm your ranking. However, when it does work, it may benefit whoever created the black hat links, especially if they already rank highly on search results pages and only need to destroy their competitors’ rankings.