What Is Grey Hat SEO?

Date First Published: 3rd January 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what grey hat SEO is in this article.

Grey hat SEO is an SEO practice that goes outside the rules of white hat SEO and is riskier but does not cause a website to be banned from search engines. It is a combination of white and black hat SEO. Grey hat SEO techniques are not strictly against the guidelines of search engines, but they are a little outside of what would be considered best practice. Since they are not in direct violation of the search engine guidelines, it makes grey hat SEO techniques more tempting than black hat SEO techniques.

Examples Of Grey Hat SEO Techniques

Examples of grey hat SEO techniques include:

Article spinning

Article spinning is the process of rewriting existing articles on the World Wide Web by using a program or tool that replaces words or phrases with synonyms or rephrases sentences, or by hired writers in order to get around duplicate content penalties by search engines and detection by plagiarism detectors. This is a common grey hat SEO technique to rank for certain keywords on Google. It is unethical and not a good practice to follow in the long term.

Automated content

Automating content involves the use of a program or tool to automate the manual processes of content creation. The goal of automated content is to provide a website with a constant stream of content to rank higher on Google. Content automation can be carried out by scraping content from other sites, combining it into pages on a website, and spinning the content to make it undetectable by plagiarism detectors and search engines as duplicate content.

Increasing keyword density with hidden text

Although using hidden text is a black hat SEO technique, this grey hat SEO technique is slightly different. It involves hiding the keywords from users, but still allowing them to be crawled by search engines. The most common grey hat SEO techniques for hiding text include locating text behind an image, setting the font size to zero, and using CSS to position the text off-screen.

Overusing website directories

Adding a website to a website directory can give it a free backlink and it is a white hat SEO technique when carried out in small numbers. However, overusing this technique to generate hundreds or thousands of backlinks to a website falls into grey hat SEO.

Using private blog networks (PBN)

A private blog network (PBN) is a group of websites controlled by a person or a group of people which are used to build backlinks to a single website in order to help it rank higher in search engines. The main goal of a PBN is to link to one central domain name to pass the most link authority to it.

Using expired domains

Sometimes, you might find expired domain names for sale with no owner, but a long history with hundreds or thousands of backlinks. This grey hat SEO technique involves buying a domain name that the owner has allowed to expire, but still has lots of authority due to the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to the site. A 301 redirect may be used to redirect all of the link authority to another domain name to improve its authority. Redirecting the domain name might cause it to point to an unrelated website.

Sometimes, an archive site, like The Wayback Machine may be used to find archives of its old content and republish it into the site, giving an instantly successful website with backlinks and allowing someone to gain ownership of a fully working website that might rank well.

Creating content that doesn't offer much value to users

The grey hat approach to creating content involves creating content without properly checking the facts, leading to lots of false or misleading information or inserting lots of spam or irrelevant content onto pages. This completely focuses on keywords and website traffic, not user satisfaction. At first, keyword research is carried out to find the most suitable keywords and then content without much value to users is created.

Even though this grey hat SEO technique will get visitors much more quickly as pages can be created without the effort of writing high-quality content, it is not a good long-term technique. Users will quickly bounce off the website once they realise that it doesn’t offer anything useful for them and may avoid the website in the future.

Since the content will not give users what they were looking for, this grey hat SEO technique will increase bounce rate the most. Even though bounce rate is not a Google or Bing ranking factor, it will greatly reduce conversions.

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