I got in an argument today about white hat - gray hat - black hat

[bunch]

Can someone with great knowledge please tell me the differences and some instances where each one is used...
Thanx

White hat
Gray hat'
Black hat

I think I was right in the argument but just to make sure can someone give me the whole truth and nuttin but the truth on what they are.

[Vadym]

Can someone with great knowledge please tell me the differences and some instances where each one is used...
Thanx

White hat
Gray hat'
Black hat

I think I was right in the argument but just to make sure can someone give me the whole truth and nuttin but the truth on what they are.

Black Hat = Spamdexing. Basically repetitively forcing the search engine to see the keyword in order to have a high keyword density, listing your keyworded page at the top. Something like "keyword keyword keyword keyword keyword keyword keyword keyword keyword" as an alt tag for the image at the top, or blending the keyword text right at the top of the page with the background, etc.

Grey Hat = What 95% of people do. You target keywords, but you're not abusing the search engine. For example, 1-5% keyword density on your Ezine articles and such. You're still targetting a keyword, and creating content for the purpose of the keyword, but it's not blatent spam, as it offers content value and doesn't abuse Google's site-crawers.

White Hat = Now, I'm not fully sure on this definition, and I've been in SEO for 3 years. My definition would be writing content for completely INFORMATIONAL sake, and any keywords there are simply as part of the content, without any intent of being placed there. In a Utopian world, Google would love all Internet content to be for CONTENTs sake, so that only White Hat SEO was possible

[Ganceann]

White Hat = a paradox in reality and rarely exists (apart from educational and government sites... perhaps why people place .edu and .gov links as preferred sources to get links from).

Grey Hat = As Vadym stated, virtually everyone does grey hat whether they think they do or not. I would probably class myself as an off-white hat content provider as I really don't do much in terms of SEO at all, but I still do a little bit and therefore would fall into the grey hat area.

Black Hat = anything and everything you can do and beyond. Legal, illegal or questionable are all included in this method. The legal and 'ethical' practices are taken to the extreme and abused in many cases and can result in short-term success. It is a classic case of rinse and repeat with every site and promotion you have until your tactics get nullified by Google etc.

Google states it prefers no direct intention to manipulate their results pages, although I have tried it before and it doesn't work because I didn't have any relevant links pointing to the site (I could find pages for certain terms that appeared on the site, but nowhere near ranked where I felt it should be - when compared to what did rank for those search terms). To get noticed you will need to provide *SOME* link into each and every page with a relevant link, but you don't need to go overboard to get a decent rank... the problem is that due to so many competitors you will probably drop down over time rather than remain highly ranked if you did get lucky and ranked highly for any term.

[bunch]

Could you add cookie stuffing
email harvesting
scripting a website to find out information etc...

can these be added to blackhat?

[Ganceann]

Could you add cookie stuffing
email harvesting
scripting a website to find out information etc...

can these be added to blackhat?

Cookie stuffing = DP court case looming = risky = black hat

email harvesting = CAN SPAM Act = risky = black hat

scripting a website to find out information = depends what type of information and how it is going to be used whether it is grey or black hat in my opinion (as it wouldn't be white hat because you aren't just going to collect information and do nothing with it)

[Blackman]

To be short and straightforward...

Black hat - when you are using abnormal techniques of achieving something, for example top position. By abnormal, I mean for example, spamming your website everywhere, registering hundreds of accounts in different places trying to link everything back to you, etc.

White hat - this is when everything is legal and natural. Slowly and gradually you are improving your website/campaign/ or whatever it is, without doing anything too harsh.

Grey hat - is the golden middle and I think this is the best option. You don't want to do too much, but also you don't want to be too weak and slow....