What is Grey Hat Marketing Techniques? Are they Good for your SEO?
Grey Hat SEO: What is it?
It is exactly what its name implies. It lies in the grey area between white and black and, when applied by a pro, may still be powerful. However, it's safe to say that employing a grey hat strategy is risky if you're not absolutely certain of what you're doing, and because content is now king, I wouldn't advise it.
Grey hat consists of techniques such as:
- Cloaking
- Purchasing old domains
- Duplicate content
- Link buying
- Social media automation and purchasing followers
Also Read: Top 5 SEO Mistakes to Avoid While Designing A Website
Cloaking
Cloaking is a technique that gives the search engine a different result than it does for the user. It is seen by Google as a high-risk behaviour that is against their policies. Many people, including myself, would classify cloaking as black hat, but in some circles of the SEO industry, it's still unclear where exactly it belongs.
Old domains
The internet is full of obsolete, abandoned, and underutilised domain names, which are frequently used to build backlinks and raise search engine results. These are often authoritative domains, giving the impression that the connection is of high quality.
Repetitive Content
Oh, the substance. It serves as the foundation for all SEO initiatives. Text spinners were brought up earlier, and even if some of them can be useful, using them is still a very bad idea. I'll spin some of the text from this post in a free text spinner to demonstrate by showing you the outcomes.
Acquiring Links
Don't is one piece of advise. Simply simply, if you are discovered, you will be penalised, and whatever investment you made in your website would be worthless. However, you are permitted to add your website to pertinent industry directories.
There have been many alarming tales about guest posting and whether or not this amounts to purchasing links, but if no money is transferred, then this is meaningless. Links can be swapped for sponsorship of events, for instance, and this is acceptable as well.
For as little as $5 for 5000, you can purchase alternative apps that automatically follow and unfollow thousands of social network accounts. Since it hasn't yet been added to Google's blacklist and probably because social signals are only now starting to matter to search engines, this is one of the few practises here that can be considered purely grey hat.
Purchasing followers could seem like a terrific way to appear popular, but all it achieves is a lack of engagement and, in certain cases, the possibility of infecting any genuine followers with malware. There are no benefits to it, and those that have may easily be identified because they have a large Twitter following full of faceless profiles. Organically obtaining a following isn’t necessarily an overnight affair, but it’s worth it in the end.
In essence, white hat tactics prevail in SEO and current content marketing. We are all aware of how competitive the web is, therefore the best approach to "beat the system" is to cooperate with it and make investments in the long-term success of your website.
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