The title says it all.  Not many knew the difference between white-hat SEO and black-hat SEO tactics until penguins and pandas brutally attacked them.

I can’t express the importance of knowing every detail about the type of search engine optimization (SEO) tactics deployed on your website to rank across all search engines. 

I’ve personally worked at and for companies as well as fielded calls and requests from customers in dire need of understanding why their websites have been penalized, lost traffic, or, worst, been de-indexed by all search engines (OUCH!).

Most of the time, many actions are in play that is quite detrimental to the loss of search ranking and organic search traffic.

Sometimes the customer is at fault due to a lack of search engine knowledge and experience to understand the difference between good and bad SEO tactics.

Other times, deceitful SEO consultants or firms take advantage of an unsuspecting customer.

Or the customer blatantly participates in bad SEO tactics, also known as black-hat SEO, for a variety of reasons.

No matter the cause for drifting to the dark side of SEO, most customers don’t want to take the time to perform good SEO, also known as white-hat SEO tactics.

The common goal of all customers seeking SEO is quite simple: increase website traffic and sales.

In today’s post, I hope to help you better understand white-hat SEO versus black-hat SEO and how both can make or break your website and business with a simple algorithm update.