As with everything else in life, there is white, black and grey in search engine optimisation. As always, grey areas and in this instance grey hat SEO, is legitimate in certain cases, but can also make your life as a webmaster incredibly difficult. There is a fine line between black and white and unless you have good reason to use the following tactics and make sure you do it the right way, you will have problems.
Online marketing is cutthroat and your competitors will use every opportunity to discredit you with the search engines, so they will report you to put you out of the competition. Thus, if you do have a legitimate reason for using what is seen as grey hat optimisation tactics, to safeguard your website credibility, put in that extra effort. Before you incorporate any grey hat tactics, contact the search engines; present your case.
Links that are paid for
Link buying solely to enhance your link popularity is considered unethical by the search engines and the search engines will either penalise such websites or discount the links. On the other hand if you should buy links for purely advertising, this is not considered illegal. If links bought for advertising purposes bring an increase in link popularity it should be seen as an added bonus; there is a fine line where link buying is concerned and if there are any doubts, either find out the facts or steer clear of this altogether.
Duplication of content
Duplicate pages are a no-no in general terms, but with more and more affiliate programs being used, the problem has become quite major for the search engine users and the search engines. The search engines use a filter to find pages that are very similar or the same and then they eliminate the page that is the duplicate.
Search engines consider duplicate content legitimate though if it is on resource websites. When a site is mainly an index of articles that is subject specific, the search engines will not penalise this website if the articles appear in another place on the Internet. BUT, when competitors use duplicate content, it is in the interest of the search engines, yourself and other web users to report such infringements to the search engines.
Cloaking
Cloaking is seen as black hat optimisation tactics in general and the search engines will penalise websites when they present two different pages to the search engines and to site visitors. Yet there are a few exceptions to this rule. Where websites have a members only area it will be necessary to present another page to the search engines as the log in process forms a barrier to their ability to crawl a website.
Web pages where the pages consist mostly of images such as an artist’s website, the web cloaked web page for the search engines will be acceptable. But, only on condition that the text on that page describes the images and are used to define that page. The above are those exceptions that result in grey hat optimisation, but it is still risky. In all of these cases the search engines should be consulted first to avoid problems.
