White Hat Vs. Black Hat - Turns Out There's a Lot of Gray

In the world of Internet marketing, practices are generally lumped into one of two categories, white hat activities and black hat activities. White hat is thought of as those who "play by the rules", white hatters don't spam, or at least they think they don't. Their intention is to grow links or interest in a website "organically", not by forcing their website on people but rather by the notion that if the website is interesting enough that it will catch on and those who like it will pass it on to others, thus growing the user base. White hatters often will manually post their links to places where it is welcomed, such as link directories and social media websites. Generally automation of marketing and search engine optimization tasks in white hat is shunned

Black hat, on the other hand is practiced by people who believe in automation. Also, black hatters do not care about spamming other Web sites and will post links that are unwelcome. However, they are not to be confused with what is traditionally thought of as "spamming" as accomplished black hatters are usually able to disguise their spam so it is not readily apparent to the average web user. Black hat is a numbers game and use of specialized softwares and automation scripts is commonplace.

There are some murky areas that confuse many people as to what is black hat and what is white hat. Many white hatters like the idea of using social media and social networking websites and think that they can apply white hat principles and still be successful on these websites. For example, a white hatter may make a Facebook account for the website he is promoting. He thinks, "well I'll just add a few hundred people that I don't know as friends and once they see how cool my website is they'll tell other people and it'll go viral. I'll just send out a few hundred PM's by hand to the people and pretty soon I'll have a ton of traffic." The black hatter, on the other hand is thinking, "I'll write an automated script and add a few thousand friends, then make a few more accounts and do the same thing. I don't want to get my accounts banned from the social network so I won't PM people but instead will just update my status frequently to get my links to show in my "friends'" status updates."

Now out of the two examples above, who is being white hat? Well, the answer is actually neither person. The "white hatter" is just practicing black hat but on a very small scale. Just because they only added and messaged a few hundred people and did manually, by hand, does not make it "white hat". The purpose of this example is to show that it is very hard to be "white hat" doing anything nowadays in the Internet marketing world, it is nearly impossible to do so with social media marketing. This has given rise to a term that may better suit these types of practices which is "grey hat".