I was chatting with another local SEO guy today and the topic of Hat’s came-up (black, white, blue, gray and all the variations in-between).

Before I go to much further, it should be known that even though I label myself as a White Hat SEO, I still read about and experiment with some Black Hat techniques. I generally don’t use these for my clients, but without doing this, I would quickly develop SEO tunnel vision.

It’s also important to realise that hat colours can change over time. A technique that is considered White Hat today, can delve into the gray area when people start abusing it. In a years time, that nice new white hat could quite easily have turned black.

I’m of the opinion that it doesn’t matter which hat you wear, as long as you tell your clients what you’re doing and the possible implications of your actions, everything should be fine. In some instances Black Hat techniques can be better than white and vice-versa.

To give you an example, a couple of years ago I worked with a client that brought-out a limited edition product range. They launched a separate website for it, and there were only going to be so many units of this item produced - after that, there would be no more and the website was going to be taken down. For this client, Black Hat techniques were ideal because the site needed to gain some exposure quite quickly, but that exposure didn’t need to be maintained for very long.

I know the example above was for a fairly unique situation, but it all comes back to what the clients long and short term goals are; if they are willing to wait for results or if they want them straight away; and if they wish to keep the results for a long time or don’t mind setting-up new sites each time they are banned.

If your clients site is the shirt, pants, dress or whatever - make sure the hat you choose (be it black, white or all shades in between), matches the rest of the outfit!

ShareThis

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!