Definition

white hat link building

White hat link building is an approach to driving traffic to a website through search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, such as relevant linking to other, relevant content on the Web. White hat links boost a website or webpage's rankings among search engines like Google through "organic" means that enhance users' experience by boosting the quality of content, broadening its scope through relevant links and so forth.

Unlike the spam-oriented tactic of black hat link building, which attempt to drive traffic to a site without adding value to content or enhancing user experience, white hat link building aims to educate users. Unlike black hat tactics, white hat link building can be labor intensive, requiring website designers and content writers to focus on quality content, then interspersing links to bolster the SEO value of the page. This "organic" type of link building to various sources around the World Wide Web is beneficial for the online community as a whole, which is why search engines like Google reward this practice in terms of a website's search engine rankings. While black-hat link building tactics offer short-term results, white hat link building strives for long-term enhancement of the Web as a whole.

This was last updated in September 2015

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