When you discuss best SEO practices, white hat SEO and blackhat SEO are two terms that you will hear a lot. Don’t be intimidated by the jargon. These are two very simple, opposing concepts. 

White hat techniques are those that help give your website good will in the eyes of search engines through good practices that genuinely aim to provide the user with quality content, that therefore gives you good rankings on search engines. 

Black hat techniques are basically the opposite. When you try cheap gimmicks to fool the search engine, you create ethical concerns and risk getting penalized by search engines. 

Thankfully, these definitions are not arbitrary. And these penalties should be taken seriously because they have real-time business consequences. Shortcuts are appealing in the short term and are easy but the risk is too high and honestly, it is not worth it.

Black hat techniques include tactics like link scraping and keyword stuffing. You will not only be heavily penalized but also run the risk of being removed from appearing in search results which is better known as being blacklisted.