In SEO, techniques come in shades of gray. From “White hat” for the “risk-free” strategy to “Black hat” for the SEO swashbucklers riding the waves of search engines.
When talking about SEO in France, we can essentially focus on Google; the other search engines only provide a small source of traffic compared with the effort and the investment in time and money required. While recent search engines like Qwant may have all our affection, in terms of ROI for most topics, we can limit ourselves to Google.
White hat, black hat.
With this in mind, the White hat SEO specialist will follow Google’s recommendations to the letter to organize their work. With this approach, one is confined almost exclusively to optimizing a site based on content (text, files, etc.).
The Black hat approach is more “pragmatic”: content, always, since the “Google Panda” algorithm made it necessary, but also links, which are the foundation of Google’s ranking algorithm. Or even lots of links, but in 2012, Google calmed things down a bit with its “Penguin” algorithm. Google’s algorithms are black and white too! Black Hat SEO takes risks and plays with the lines, only to end up getting its knuckles rapped by Google and finding its sites in the abyss of the results pages.
Gray Hat
For a brand with a long-term objective, it is impossible to do only Black hat; the risk of “killing” the site is too great. Likewise, limiting yourself to White techniques is often too complicated if you hope to get results in competitive commercial sectors.
Without defining themselves this way, most SEO services end up in the middle, Grey Hat, whether deliberately or through lack of knowledge.
The effectiveness of the SERPs tightrope walker (search engine results pages) lies in their ability to make techniques traditionally reserved for Black hat SEO appear whiter. Cloaking is typically one of those Black hat techniques that can be thoroughly modernized so that any website can benefit from it.
Cloaking
With this in mind, the White hat SEO specialist will follow Google’s recommendations to the letter to organize their work. With this approach, one is confined almost exclusively to optimizing a site based on content (text, files, etc.).
Historically, cloaking aimed to capture easy traffic and redirect it toward highly commercial and highly competitive topics. The audience has evolved, and it is not with “giant Flemish rabbit,” a relatively easy query, that you will be able to sell a smartphone. We are now used to getting a relevant answer to our search, and not to being easily distracted. The approach is now more diplomatic.
A White SEO specialist will ask you to produce a 2,500-word page on your homepage, while your marketing department will want to limit itself to a tagline, a photo and a “call to action” button.
This extreme case can be partially resolved with cloaking, by adapting your site to each visitor to give them what they came looking for (content for a crawler, quick information with a button to the next action for a human).
Between the internet user and the web page lies a significant number of technologies (dns, web server, html, css, php … ), each of which can be diverted for an SEO “cloaking” objective (CDN, user account, remarketing … ).
You may already be doing cloaking on your site without knowing it, and at no point have you asked yourself whether you were putting your site’s SEO at risk.
I invite you to discover on September 4 all the cloaking techniques that can be implemented to optimize a site.
So that SEO can be optimal and marketing is no longer held back.
