TL;DR

There is increasing chatter about the perceived naivety of abiding by the rules of a search engine that has never attempted to play fair in return. However, while it is indisputable that Google has unfairly leveraged this one-sided relationship – actively deceiving the community on several occasions, and even going so far as to attempt to tarnish reputations – the web has broadly benefited from the majority’s adherence to white hat best practice. 

Pursuit of black hat techniques is undoubtedly profitable in many instances – especially in areas such as pornography and gambling – and for short term endeavours where rapidly pivoting direction or closing down a brand are acceptable risks, but for SEOs that work with clients in heavily regulated businesses, or brands looking to establish a positive, long-term reputation, white hat work is really the only way to responsibly deliver SEO to clients in heavily regulated industries and with long-term reputational goals..

Introduction

For multiple decades, Google has consistently used the SEO community as a tool to tidy up the web – we sped it up, made it mobile friendly, filled it with trillions of words of a thousand shades of content, and have played a huge role in helping to craft and deliver the search experience that has helped Google’s parent company reach a market cap of more than $4Tn (we’d imagine it’s done more for Alphabet than the Google Pixel, anyway).

Since 1997, Google has moved further and further away from (or at least abandoned ethical objections toward) Larry Page’s professed opinion that ad funded search would be “inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers”; it has diluted the importance of the 10 blue links (through various rich results, through position zero, through ad pollution and, latterly, AI Overviews); it has consistently lied about or obfuscated ranking signals – including the use of clickstream data (as revealed by what we’ve now seen referred to as the “ClickiLeaks” scandal – which is our new name for it forever); and it has sent progressively less of its overall traffic to the sites that have allowed their bots to mine their data for free for 30 years.

So what’s the point? If the relationship is so one-sided, why continue to play by their rules? Thus goes the argument of some in the SEO community that make a far healthier living than we do, precisely by implementing creative and well-crafted grey and black-hat strategies. We won’t be getting into specific names here – we have no interest in getting into a debate, but we’ll try to steelman their arguments as much as we can as we discuss the topic. 

The black hat perspective: short-term profit and asymmetric risk

As we stated above – this is a steelmanning situation. These are not necessarily statements we agree with, but this is our good faith understanding of the current position of black and grey hat SEOs regarding the current state of the industry.

1. Google has a documented history of lying to SEOs

This isn’t conjecture or conspiracy theory, it’s on record. Google representatives have repeatedly made public statements that were later contradicted by leaked internal documents and/or court disclosures:

• The 2024 Google antitrust trial, and DOJ leak of internal documents, revealed Google uses signals it publicly denied using (clicks, user engagement, Chrome browsing data) as ranking factors. For years, Googlers told the SEO community these were not used.
• PageRank was officially “retired” in 2016, with Google claiming it was no longer a useful signal. Internal documents confirmed it remains central to ranking.
• Google repeatedly denies domain age, exact match domains, and certain link signals matter, while evidence consistently suggests they do.

This indicates not occasional miscommunication but systematic misdirection, protecting a proprietary system worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

2. Google’s guidelines are self-serving, not ethical

Google has, historically, framed the “white hat” vs “black hat” dialectic as a moral argument, but their decisions on which tactic sits under which colour is really a business distinction. Google’s guidelines exist to:

• Protect the quality of their product (search results)
• Reduce their own costs (manual review, algorithm development)
• Maintain advertiser trust

When Google tells you not to build links artificially, it’s not because they believe link manipulation is morally wrong, it’s because widespread link manipulation degrades their product. The ethical framing is, therefore, a PR construct that transfers Google’s quality-control burden onto the SEO industry and its practitioners for free, convincing them that compliance is a virtue.

3. The goalposts move constantly and retroactively

White hat SEOs invest years following Google approved best practices, only for those practices to be penalised retroactively:

• Guest posting was endorsed, then declared manipulative.
• Exact match anchor text was fine, then over-optimised.
• Structured, keyword-rich content became “thin content.”
• Infographic link building was a best practice, then a scheme.

These rules are often rewritten arbitrarily, with penalties applied retroactively. A rational actor, the argument would go, shouldn’t sign a contract with a counterpart who is able to rewrite terms unilaterally, and punish you for following the agreed upon ones.

4. Black hat practitioners understand the system more honestly

The black hat community (at the more sophisticated end) operates with a clearer-eyed view of Google – as an adversary, leading to:

• Rigorous empirical testing rather than trusting Google’s word
• Faster adaptation to how the algorithm actually works vs. how Google says it works
• A more accurate mental model of ranking as a competitive, gameable system

Many of the SEO industry’s most accurate technical insights have come from black hat researchers – precisely because they test reality rather than deferring to Google as an authority.

5. The risk calculus is more balanced than white hats admit

White hat SEOs often argue black hat practices are too risky. However:

• White hat practices are no guarantee of immunity, and countless legitimate businesses have been wiped out by broad algorithm updates (Helpful Content, various Penguin/Panda updates) despite following guidelines either in full, or as they understood them at the time. The “safe” path carries a significant, underdiscussed risk due to Google’s monopoly practices.
• Black hat risk is often manageable with proper site architecture (separation of money sites from test sites, diversified traffic sources, rapid pivoting).
• The asymmetric upside of black hat (faster rankings, lower costs, higher margins) can fund diversification that makes a business more resilient.

6. Google engages in self-preferencing that would be “black hat” if anyone else did it

Regulators in the EU and US have repeatedly found that Google manipulates search results to favour its own products – and the recent update again saw a huge increase in the visibility of YouTube, for example. 

Google has, in fact, lost legal disputes that have proven that it has applied ranking rules to competitors that it exempts itself from. The entity setting the ethical standards for SEO is simultaneously the most powerful manipulator of search results in existence. Deferring to Google’s moral framework uncritically, therefore, is, at minimum, naive.

The white hat perspective: long-term resilience and full disclosure

Again, this is a steelmanning situation – while these are arguments that are much closer to how we think, again, we’re trying to present the alternative here as robustly as possible.

1. Google has a documented history of lying to SEOs

While the black and grey hat community often portrays white hat practitioners as naively asking “how high?” whenever Google says jump, We doubt many of the top practitioners on the white hat side of the fence would offer any argument to this statement. We were mostly watching along, maybe even helping out with a click or two when Rand Fishkin was still at Moz and doing click-through experiments (back in 2015 for those keeping count), in fact we often said, ourselves, in various blogs over the years, that it would be “insane” for Google to have clickstream data and not use it. 

In fact, while the black hat community seems to think that it is edgy and anti-authoritarian and views antagonists as diametrically opposed in every way, they would likely be surprised to find that, for the most part, every SEO is constantly prodding at the algorithm, testing various theories and has been aware for a very long time that Google was less than truthful about a lot of things. 

The critical divergence between the two communities is not in awareness, but in how they interpret their professional duty. White hat practitioners believe that, regardless of Google’s dishonesty, their primary obligation is to deliver predictable, sustainable, and low-risk outcomes for their clients, making Google’s integrity irrelevant to the service being provided.

2. Google’s guidelines are self-serving, not ethical

While, again, you’re unlikely to find many arguments against the three bullet points we made in the argument for black hat tactics, we think there is an element of the ‘but what if we create a better world for nothing’ meme when railing against improving the quality of search. Sure, it is absolutely pushed, maybe even primarily pushed, by Google to protect product quality – but if you can help to improve the internet – why not do it? 

It’s not exactly that one side is seen as implicitly more moral than the other where this aspect of SEO is concerned (though, in some cases, it certainly is – see Clickout Media’s parasitism and treatment of journalists), we think there’s just a drive, similar to that of the Wikipedia editor in some, maybe even many SEOs, to try to create what they feel is a better, more helpful, more accessible internet. 

You can believe in that cause and still absolutely believe that Google is a fundamentally broken and monopolist business that has misused its power for profit – it’s not something that stops SEOs from acting in the best interests of their clients, they just try to do both where possible.

3. The goalposts move constantly and retroactively

SEO best practice has been fundamentally unchanged for more than a decade, maybe even two (pretty much since Penguin and Panda, at least). The only things that have really changed have been the push to speed up load times, the push to mobile accessibility and things like interstitial penalties and, lately, promised penalties for back-button hijacking. 

Link-farming, thin content, and keyword stuffing were added to the ‘spam’ pile at around the same time as forum link spam. These are, objectively, annoying to the user, and generally offer no value beyond ranking manipulation – and that’s where the divide falls, one side feels that the ends justify the means when it comes to such tactics, the other doesn’t. 

Instead, the white hat community sees the negative impact on user experience, potential to damage brand perception, and the risk, whether justified or not, of manual or algorithmic penalties as combining to make certain tactics unjustifiable risks for their clients.

The guest posting, anchor text and infographic decisions were, though you could see them as sending mixed messages, only applicable in extreme cases – where the practice tips over a line to become manipulation or spam. For that reason, it’s difficult to agree with shifting goalposts as a valid argument against white hat practices. 

4. Black hat practitioners understand the system more honestly

The majority of black and grey hat practitioners would likely profess a superior level of savviness when it comes to which tactics offer the best mix of risk and reward. The problem is that not every practitioner has achieved such levels (on either side).

However, there are some genuinely talented SEOs in the space – their testing is robust and their results in some incredibly tricky niches are impressive. There is absolutely a place for these tests – though where we disagree is in the assumption that they are only undertaken by one side. Some of the best tests I’ve seen in SEO over the years have been from people and organisations that would likely baulk at the ‘black hat’ label – including this and this from Ahrefs (though we’d probably take issue with bits of each).

We think the main thing here – and throughout, if we’re honest, as we write this – is that there are poor practitioners on both sides that are being treated as Ur-examples of their kind. The real difference is simply in the calculation of risk – and the safety parameters that both sides use to decide which risks are worth the reward.

5. The risk calculus is more balanced than white hats admit

Again, this is a yes and no situation – we think the main argument on risk here is that, for most businesses looking to establish or maintain a brand reputation over short-term revenue maximisation, that the risks of white hat are undeniably lower than those of black hat techniques.

That being said, we think more should be made of the risks of the safe path, and how that relates to Google’s monopolistic practices – the interview Sundar Pichai gave recently on the future of search that made no mention of sending traffic to websites should give every business pause for thought. The phrase that always comes to mind is: don’t build your house on borrowed land. Google absolutely does not have the businesses and publishers, which have helped it achieve its dominance, at heart, and all efforts should be taken – in addition to SEO – to build brand recognition, email lists and ways to reach customers which do not depend on Google.

Whether or not the risk/reward calculations are unbalanced, white hat techniques are the closest a brand can get to an insurance policy against the potential for reputational damage that some techniques can cause, and against the expense of recovering from an algorithmic or manual penalty – both in terms of labour expenses and lost revenue.

6. Google engages in self-preferencing that would be “black hat” if anyone else did it

Again, we wouldn’t argue with this point, but would point out (again) that acknowledging the factual basis for this argument is not acknowledging the ‘therefore’ that it implies. The capacity to get away with something in the short term does not imply that same immunity in the long term, nor does the negative activity of one party offer carte blanche for reciprocation.

What many, if not most, white hat SEO practitioners are attempting to do is to provide a service that operates with known technical limitations, in the shadow of an unfair ruler, but which they hope will deliver long-term, sustainable success in search. There are, of course, SEOs happy to use white hat techniques for brands that many would find morally objectionable (see the Epstein files, for example), just as there are black hat practitioners that see themselves as moral ‘crusaders’ against an unjust company.

The ethics of SEO really only apply in terms of transparency and in the avoidance of negative impact on third-parties. Morality, as with anything, is down to the individual. As always, the answer is never firmly in the black or white, but in the shades of grey.

Conclusion

The entire argument is a false dichotomy that has been supported by bad-faith arguments on both sides. The real argument here is about the level of acceptable risk and its honest presentation to clients.

The debate is not about morality, but about liability. SEO services should always come with explicit client discussions regarding the level of risk exposure and, where black hat practices are to be used, contracts should explicitly document the potential long-term costs of recovery associated with tactics that deviate from Google’s publicly stated guidelines. This isn’t about the ethics of the practices themselves (every practitioner is free to do as they wish within the law), it’s about transparency.

Could we, in good faith, sell black hat services? No. We don’t work in verticals or with brands that would benefit from them. Should nobody be allowed? Of course not. Provided everybody involved is properly informed of the risks, there is nothing illegal, or even necessarily immoral about it.

Our only objection is when such techniques are used either without the client being aware of the potential risk to revenue and reputation, or when they are undertaken in a manner that directly and negatively impacts others (such as the Clickout Media activity mentioned earlier).

So no, in short, it’s not naive to continue to offer and promote white hat SEO practices. In fact, the people that have dedicated themselves to presenting a clean-cut image of SEO can be credited for its establishment as a marketing service that doesn’t need to be hidden away behind NDAs, and one in which people can take pride in working. If you’d like some help getting the best out of your SEO performance, why not dop us a message?