Grey Hat SEO - What It Is

Long ago, it wasn’t so hard getting your website ranked well in the search results. High-quality content and the right keywords typically sufficed in earning you a respectable ranking. But things aren’t so simple today.

While most people use white hat SEO to rank their sites, which are techniques and tactics approved by Google, others use black hat SEO. Black hat techniques are not Google-approved which means they put you at risk for a serious penalisation.

In addition to white hat and black hat SEO, there’s something in between called grey hat SEO. This type of SEO consists of using tactics and techniques which simply aren’t well-defined by published material coming out of Google. In other words, grey hat techniques don’t generally adhere to Google’s guidelines but can still be acceptable to use.

The primary benefit of grey hat SEO is that it can produce faster results than white hat strategies and carry significantly fewer risks than black hat methods. Here are a few examples of grey hat SEO tactics that many people are using today.

Buying Expired Domains

This is a technique that involves purchasing expired domains to redirect traffic to your domain or keep to build backlinks to your site. Whichever way you go, you get an easy SEO advantage that doesn’t cost a whole lot. To do this well without raising too many eyebrows at Google, the expired domains you buy should be in your niche and they shouldn’t have any bans or penalties on them.

Buying Available Domains

This is a little less shady than buying expired domains but it still carries some risks. If the available domains you buy have backlinks, they can still drive traffic to your site. Again, to keep yourself out of trouble with Google, make sure the domains are in your niche.

Occasional Site Redesign

You could get a small SEO boost by making small changes or tweaks to your site’s design. This grey hat technique can work because when you redesign your site, you change the code, which Google considers fresh content.

Trading Links

While automatic link exchange is a common black hat technique, doing it manually is grey hat. This technique is easy because all you have to do is contact the big players in your niche and ask them to include some of your links in their content in exchange for you adding some of theirs in yours. Linking to authority websites has always been a great technique for quickly gaining more search traffic.

SEO rules and guidelines aren’t always easy to follow. Spending some time in the grey area isn’t as bad or as risky as many people believe if you’re careful about how you carry out your grey hat SEO. If you make many mistakes or go overboard, your site can end up being deindexed by Google so play it smart.