Does White Hat SEO actually exist?

I’ve been in the internet marketing field for many years now and one of the most common debates has to do with differentiating “White Hat SEO” vs. “Black Hat SEO”. According to many people, “White Hat SEO” is when you follow Google’s and the other major search engines’ webmaster guidelines, “ethically” boosting your search engine rankings, and don’t do anything to make them mad, like paying for links and spamming, while “Black Hat SEO” is when you manipulate the search results by…well, paying for links, spamming, etc.

But is “White Hat SEO” not as pure and politically correct as many make it seem?

Let me give you some insight so you can come up with the decision on your own. In general, boosting your website’s rankings for certain keywords requires a lot of inbound links and fresh content on your website. There are case studies out there that tell you Google and Bing love those links. But where do those links come from? The ones who use “White Hat SEO” use common techniques such as submitting to thousands of business directories and blogs humans will probably never run across. Wouldn’t this be considered manipulating the search engines to get a result you want? If so, how is this “White Hat”.

Aren’t you supposed to gather links to your website the natural way by gradually getting links from someone who thought your website was great? If you think about it, when was the last time you were browsing the web and came across a site you really liked and said, “This is awesome, I like it so much, I’m going to log into my FTP or CMS, modify a page, and add a link to that website with a specific keyword”?

Likely never.

I’m not trying to say “White Hat SEO” is stained and should be considered “Black Hat SEO”. However, I’d want others to be aware of these terms when pushy internet marketers and salesmen brag about using “White Hat SEO-only” techniques because in reality, it’s all grey area.