As most webmasters should know there are two different types of approaches you can take when doing search engine optimization, there is black hat SEO and white hat SEO and even a middle ground considered gray hat. As tempting as it may seem black hat SEO while may get you results quicker and also greater results all the while saving you money will have short lasting effects.

Now days there are many new ways for Black hat SEO which you should be aware of to avoid if you wish to keep your websites rankings strong over the years. Many of the older methods you will not find in use now days just because many search engines have improved to devalue these methods quickly some of them include doorway pages, invisible text and duplicate sites all just to manipulate rankings and earnings. But now days the Black hat methods have became tougher for the search engines to detect.

A lot of the black hat methods which are used today are via automated tools which spam many various community sites forums and blogs with the goal to create content with backlinks coming from thousands of domains. Another method you will find is tools that automatically spin content to create 100’s of articles just from one article… while it seems very easy but doesn’t give much reader benefit this is what makes it useless to others.

Some white hat methods which you can do to avoid getting into black hat are creating unique content like articles, meaningful discussions on blogs, press release articles, directory submissions which include various titles and descriptions and many other methods are all white hat. In the long run white hat will definitely conquer over black hat since search engines are always trying to stay ahead of these spamming methods of link building.

You will find if you use black hat methods you are also risking getting your website either sandboxed in Google for a period of time or even de-indexed from Google indefinitely until you request reconsideration from Google via the webmaster tools. Many also may argue that if that could happen wouldn’t my competitors do black hat for my site just to get ahead of me in rankings? Technically no but if Google did find specific pieces of information which led them to believe you are doing black hat you could risk it and also at the very least all the black hat link building you did would be devalued completely to be useless.

In summary, it's best to put all of your efforts into white hat SEO methods so you can be sure that the work your doing for your site is ethical and while may be slower to progress in the search engines but overall you can feel better about the work that is being done.