White Hat Link Building: Strategies, Popular Techniques & Definition

What is white hat link building? It’s the umbrella term for all the techniques that are accepted by Google when creating links. In other words, the algorithms won’t penalize your site for such practices.

The most common and best white hat link building strategies include: guest posting, broken link building, creating linkable content, and subscribing to HARO. The fact that something isn’t straightforwardly considered white hat doesn’t mean that it’s black hat either – in many cases, you will find gray areas where it all depends on how you conduct the strategy, not the strategy itself. After all, even guest posts can become black hat, if published on PBNs rather than on regular websites. Do you want to learn more? Then read on!

What Is White Hat Link Building? Definition

White hat link building refers to those link building practices that are safe for your website and accepted by Google. The term refers to links that bring true value and were acquired in an ethical way while following the tech giant’s guidelines.

White hat link building is often contrasted with black hat link building, which uses shady techniques to manipulate the algorithms. Google can penalize the latter, but it is still used since it provides effects more quickly. Additionally, many techniques and strategies might fall somewhere in between – depending on how they are conducted, they might be black or white hats.

Best White Hat Link-Building Techniques, Strategies, and Methods

Naturally, since white hat link building is safe for your website, it can increase your site’s authority, hence improving its visibility in SERPs. Therefore, you should employ white hat link building strategies in your company. What are the most common and effective ones? Here’s a brief overview.

Guest Posting

Being one of the most effective link building techniques overall, guest posting is naturally a great white hat strategy. It involves publishing high-quality content, typically articles, on other websites. Naturally, such posts contain a link to your own site.

While in general, guest posting is considered white hat, there are instances where it can become black hat. For instance, if you publish your articles on PBNs – sites designed with the sole purpose of transferring SEO juice through links – this will likely have no on your website’s rank in SERPs or even a negative one. Such scammy, fake guest posts are something you need to be aware of and avoid at all costs – it’s also one of the reasons why you need to be really careful when you receive guest posting offers for your website.

What if you wanted to buy guest posting? Well, it’s fine. Google allows website owners to use the services of agencies as long as those agencies stick to its guidelines and acquire links ethically. This means that you can outsource services that will locate a relevant website for your guest posts, negotiate with its owner, and even write the post for you.

This is also why we offer you guest posting packages at Linkhouse. We can find a good domain for your posts, based on the metrics chosen by you, and write the whole article for you. All you have to do is choose the parameters and provide us with the guidelines.

Broken Link-Building

Broken link-building is another effective white hat SEO strategy for your link building. It involves locating links that lead to sites that no longer exist, contacting the owners of the content and offering them to link to your articles instead.

Naturally, broken link building isn’t easy. You first need to find sites that offer relevant content and look for broken links, which don’t happen often. Even when you find them, it’s not the end of the story – you still have to convince the owner (or pay) to get your link live, so it’s a time-consuming technique, though it’s worth the effort.

Create Linkable Content Using Infographics, Stats, and Charts

The best way to obtain high-authority backlinks is to create content that users simply want to share. A simple article won’t do the trick (unless it’s a true masterpiece) – you need to think about the form of content you create.

Take, for instance, Statista – have you ever considered how often their charts are cited, hence linked to by other internet users? Probably tens if not hundreds of times a day. This is because you naturally want to provide a source for your statistics when creating content.

The same goes for infographics and charts – they are highly linkable assets that users will surely share. Therefore, you should consider such types of content when planning your white hat link building strategy.

Subscribing to HARO

Help a Reporter Out or HARO is an interesting initiative that doesn’t take much of your time but can get you quite a few high-quality backlinks. The principle behind it is simple:

• You sign up for the program.
• When a journalist is writing an article, they might ask you for your insights on the topic – you get this request via e-mail.
• You respond with your input and source from your website.
• It’s likely that the writer will add a link to your site in their content.

What About The Other Methods? Black Hat Link Building

Naturally, the above are just a few of the white hat techniques – you know what white hat link building is all about, so you can probably come up with a few more on your own. What we would like to discuss now is the opposite side of the coin – black hat link building.

This term refers to a set of techniques and strategies that are aimed at manipulating search engine results and, hence, are unethical. Some of the most common examples of such strategies include:

• using private blog networks (PBNs),
• lengthy and low-quality directory submissions,
• spammy links in comments sections,
• creating spam social media accounts to build links,
• generally unnatural links.

Gray Hat Link Building – An Area in-Between

Apart from white hat link building and black hat link building, there is gray hat link building – techniques and strategies that aren’t always penalized but aren’t fully white hat either. The problem with those techniques, from an SEO perspective, is that whether they are fine or not usually depends on how they are conducted.

For instance, take link buying. If you purchase links from our link building marketplace, you don’t have to worry about penalties since we acquire these links naturally, ensuring that they are in line with Google’s standards and you know what domains your inbound links will be coming from. On the other hand, if you get a shady e-mail with an opportunity to buy backlinks, these will likely come from link farms – sites designed just to post links – and the algorithm will likely penalize you.

The same can be said for many other link-building strategies – even using directories can be black or white hat, depending on the quality of your entries. This is why you should always work with SEO experts, such as Linkhouse – only specialists know how to navigate link building in line with what Google expects from website owners.

The Takeaway

Sticking to white hat link building strategies should be the aim of any website owner. Tempting as it may be, using black hat techniques will bring you only temporary gains – sooner or later, your site will drop in search engine results pages significantly due to Google penalizing it. Thus, if you don’t know how to conduct link building on your own, you should work with off-site SEO specialists or use link-building tools from reliable sources, such as Linkhouse.

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