Grey (or gray) hat SEO is an SEO technique that lies between the approaches of white hat SEO and black hat SEO.
To fully understand grey hat SEO, it’s important to outline the white hat and black hat techniques.
These different SEO techniques help a website to rank higher in search engine results, particularly on Google.
What characterizes white hat SEO is the use of on-page SEO techniques that respect Google’s standards and requirements.
When it comes to white hat SEO, content quality is a key concern, as is site ergonomics.
These elements must meet readers’ requirements and expectations: unique, high value-added content, ergonomic navigation, meticulous design, etc.
Black hat SEO, on the other hand, is the use of SEO techniques that don’t necessarily respect Google’s guidelines.
The actions taken can often be condemned by the search engine.
These tactics can take the form of creating low-quality, spun content, massively creating links with little coherence with the site, or even cloaking a page to manipulate the path taken by internet users.
Grey hat SEO therefore concerns practices that fall somewhere between white hat and black hat SEO. It’s an in-between practice that optimizes a site’s rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Grey hat SEO is then based on quality methods (optimized, relevant content, keyword selection, etc.) as well as actions that reasonably exceed the limits imposed by Google’s algorithms (the buying of backlinks, sometimes excessive use of keywords and/or exact match domains, content spinning, leveraging content farms, etc.).
When it comes to SEO, it’s essential to identify the limits imposed by Google to know the best practices and not fall into actions that could penalize you.
