What is Grey Hat SEO?

Grey Hat SEO, also called grey SEO, includes all those techniques that do not follow Google’s guidelines to the letter, but do not lead to a penalty. It is, in short, a fuzzy area between White and Black Hat SEO to which you can resort to “trick” Google and obtain a better positioning in less time.

Main Grey Hat SEO techniques

The best way to really understand what Grey Hat SEO is, is to exemplify the most used techniques. You will realize that there is a wide spectrum of loopholes, areas ignored by Google that you can take advantage of to achieve your SEO goals.

1. Link Buying

Link building is one of the main SEO techniques. The more links pointing to your site, the higher your site’s page rank will be. Normally, links are placed by users or site administrators on their own initiative.

But we can get some extra links by paying for them. This is classic gray SEO. And it is also possible to exchange links (always with care, because Google does not usually look favorably on this). It may not be a positioning based on organic traffic, nor will your content go viral by itself. But if Google doesn’t notice, you will gain extra positioning points.

2. Domain recycling

As you know, the page rank of a domain increases over time, as long as repeated penalties do not prevent it. So setting up a website on a domain that is a few years old and has a high page rank will give you more page authority than a recent one.

You can also use this domain to create backlinks to your main site. But don’t overdo it, lest Google penalize you. The important thing here is that the domain is positioned through the right keywords.

3. Exploit the potential of social networks

The right thing to do is to post links to your page from the social network profiles you have set up for your business. But you can exploit the potential of social networks even more by doing some gray SEO. How? By creating one or more profiles that have nothing to do with the brand, but are attractive enough to attract thousands of users. For example, a page of graphic jokes on Facebook. Undoubtedly, a space to post “occasional” links to your business.

Other ways to make Grey Hat

1. Redesign the site

A representative example of Grey Hat SEO is that Google loves new content, but it is not yet clear how to detect it. In other words, you don’t have to write a new article every week. If you redesign the site often, the search engine will see new web elements in the source code. And it will think that this is new content, even if there is not a single extra paragraph. A good way to do this is to change the template of your site if you use a CMS like WordPress.

2. Play with keywords

Another excellent Grey Hat SEO technique is to confuse the search engine by using convenient synonyms and homonyms for your keywords. This will increase the variety of queries that highlight your page, and you will get more traffic than usual among the search results.

You can also use keywords with high search volume that have nothing to do with your brand, but match a term you are using. For example: “what are social cards”, usually yields results with job search. However, you can use it if you talk about social cards in social networks.

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