In the world where almost everything is digital, most business owners have become more competitive with each other. Of course, almost all of them already know the role of SEO in the business world; therefore, most of them use SEO services to help improve their business. However, only few of them know that there are SEO techniques that they should avoid, some are unaware that they can face consequences when using the wrong SEO techniques. Be careful, you might be one of them.

Before we get to grey hat SEO, we are going to briefly describe about white hat and black hat SEO. White hat techniques are considered legal and done according to search engines’ rules and guidelines, while black hat techniques are considered illegal due to its “cheating” methods that, though it’s a shortcut, are against search engines’ rules and guidelines. So, grey hat, we can say, is somewhere in the middle of white and black. Although if used properly by a professional, can be effective, it is still highly risky if you are not careful.

In this article, we are going to explain about what kind of methods done with grey hat SEO techniques and we are going to tell you whether or not you should use this technique. Let’s start by recognising the things that are considered as grey-hat SEO techniques!

Buying links

Okay, this is not advisable. If Google finds out, you will get a penalty. If that happens, your company will lose credibility, and it will take time to get Google trust you again. Many company wants fast results, so they buy links, sure it may look good at first, but one thing for sure, Google acts faster than you think, and in seconds, your business is over. So, think twice before buying links!

Social media automation and purchasing followers

Ever seen any, let’s say, Instagram business profile that has more than 10.000 followers, but there is no interaction or likes on their posts? How could a social media business profile has more than 10.000 followers but zero likes? Yes, if you have seen a business profile like that, then there is a chance that the owner might practice grey-hat SEO techniques. While it’s not that “illegal” to purchase followers, or use tools to automatically follow and unfollow more than 1000 users, it will not give you any significant result, and certainly, the real users who visit your social media account will notice that sooner or later, and this, will result in a bad reputation for your company.

Duplicate content

Yes, as the name suggests, duplicate content means your content appears in more than one place on the internet. While you don’t really get a penalty for that, it can still affect search engine rankings. According to Google, if duplicate content appears in more than one location on the internet, it will be hard for search engines to choose which version is the most relevant to the search query.

Paying for reviews

You can actually pay people to write reviews on your website, and this is legal. However, let’s face it; do you really want fake reviews on your website? It is still considered as cheating, and even though Google doesn’t care about that, your customers do.

That’s some of the examples of grey-hat SEO. So, would we recommend it for you? The answer is no. White-hat SEO is still the most recommended method for you. Although some of the grey-hat SEO methods are not really considered as breaking the rules; that will still result in difficulties with the optimisation process and it will be difficult for your website to rank high. Also, if you are not careful enough, you may get into trouble with search engines later. That’s why, we recommend hiring a professional SEO agency that can provide you with clean white-hat SEO techniques for your website, so that you will rank high in a better way.