I bet you are all familiar with white and black hat SEO. But if you have never heard of these words before, let me break it down for you. White hat is a SEO technique that only targets human audience and not search engines. It’s considered as the best approach to drive traffic to a website without compromising the site’s integrity and legitimacy.

Black hat on the other hand is a complete opposite. It only targets search engines not people. It’s an aggressive SEO tactic, but also dangerous because it does not follow search engine guidelines.  It’s a risky path to take if you are not sure how it works. It can easily get your site banned or penalized.

Now, gray hat as the name suggests, lies somehow in the middle. This technique is also a little bit riskier and you might find yourself in trouble if it doesn’t work. What I’m trying to say is it’s a 50-50 chance. But sometimes in life, you have to take some chances to win right?

So, take a look at these gray hat techniques that might just work for your website.

1. Duplicating content

This is whereby you generate a ‘new’ content from an already existing one. It’s basically changing a few things from the article format, phrases and all. However, things can go bad for you if you fail to provide a unique content. Google will penalize you for violating duplicate content rules.

On the other hand, article spinning might as well work magic. If your spun article adds more ‘flavor’ to the original version, then you can get it to different websites and get more backlinks.

 2. Use old or expired domains

The domains can be expired or the owners don’t use them as much. So this can go two ways; you can use the domains to create backlinks to your site which will improve your search engine rankings or Google might notice it and consider it irrelevant.

 3. Updating your site constantly

If you keep updating your site every now and then to boost your local SEO, it will seem a bit fishy. Google might take note of these constant small changes and actually penalize you.  This tactic can as well work if you trick Google into believing you are just updating your site with fresh content.

 4. Social bookmarking

This gray hat technique actually comes in handy. It’s a great tool for driving quality traffic to your website. All you have to do is create accounts on social bookmarking sites like digg.com and del.icio.us, and bookmark your content.

This can go horrible wrong as well. Using too much social bookmarking might appear spammy and you might just be penalized for it. It’s best if you only use a few social bookmarking sites.

 5. Putting  too much content on your homepage and blogs/articles

Shoving too much information on your visitors’ throat on the homepage or in your articles can be disastrous. Your visitors might leave faster than they arrived. But then again, people prefer sites with detailed and valuable information, but only if the site is properly structured. Also, search engines rank sites with detailed content highly.

 So this strategy might work if you create a proper site structure search engines and visitors will love.

6. Create useful bridge pages

Bridge pages, also known as doorway pages are shortcuts most SEOs avoid. Search engines have prohibited the use of bridge pages and if you get caught things might not sit pretty well for your site. However, you can avoid being flagged down if you create useful, helpful and valuable content. This can also increase traffic to your website.