White and black, light and dark, good and bad. We all know what these terms mean and how they are one in contrast with each other, but when it comes to whitehat SEO and blackhat SEO not everyone is familiar with these terms, so in this article we will be talking about what each does and you will probably find out if you have ever used blackhat methods to promote a website.

First and foremost, a simple definition is required for both. Put it this way : whitehat techniques are those practices that stay under radar, are legit and ethical like link building through link baiting, content worthy for links and so on. On the other hand, blakhat methods are those trying to simply trick the system. Among popular blackhat methods used we find spamming, backdoor pages, blackhat tools used to get links, link buying and so on. But can whitehat and blackhat work together in some way ?

Let’s take for example a popular blackhat tool used by thousands of webmasters lately and even online businesses owners, Scrapebox. What it can basically do it harvest the Internet for blogs related to a specific keyword/niche, lists its and mass comment on its for backlinks. This is pure spamming, you might say, how can this be used as a whitehat technique ? Well, it can be used in several ways, I will only enumerate the most popular ones. It can simply get a lot of links that your competition has gathered in time, not only blogs/forums links but also links from article marketing, paid links and so on. It becomes a simple routine to try and follow them, see what link you can acquire as well and crus hits it their own weapons. Second, it is a great keyword scrapper : put it this way, where Google Keyword Tool gives you 200 results for a specific keyword, this can literally perform three times better while it uses Yahoo’s and other keyword tools’ databases for this. Is this legit ? Of course it is, you see now how a blackhat tool can be used for whitehat SEO.

So why do some webmasters go with the darker part of search engine optimisation ? First reason would be faster results in SERPs and this reason is strictly related to the second one, fast money. They do not care if the promoted website gets banned from the engines in a month or two, until then they would have made thousands of dollars from different monetizing methods. By the time a website is banned or de-indexed, they are already working on two new ones, so it’s a cycle that never ends, for now.

However, for building a long-term online business or even creating a website for long-term incomes usually pays off better while using whitehat techniques, of course some guys might disagree, some might agree. In the end, it only depends on each person’s vision of the future and choosing between those two techniques or even mixing its will definitely bring with great results, if used according to the «books».