There has been a lot of discussion about black vs. white hat SEO over the years, but which colour are you?

Take our SEO test to discover your hat colour…

Have you ever?

1. Paid a blogger to write about you? (e.g. using Pay-per-post)
2. Leased links to your websites primarily for their SEO value? (Text-link-ads for example)
3. Scraped other websites for their content either directly or through RSS feeds?
4. Posted spammy, off topic or brazenly self-promoting comments to blogs or forums?
5. Submitted your website to hundreds of web directories or search engines?
6. Submitted near identical content containing backlinks – such as articles or press releases – three or more websites at a time?
7. Created a content-rich landing page and then changed it over to a sales page? (link bait & switch)
8. Sold or leased out links or whole pages from your website without nofollowing them?
9. Joined a link exchange with a view to exchanging links primarily for ranking purposes?
10. Hidden (cloaked) text on your website, or used redirects to deceive the search engines?

Now add up how many questions you said yes to.

Your Score

0-1 You are a search engine angel, or work for them, or have never heard of SEO. We admire your whiter-than-white morals, but fear that your competitors have already outranked you.

2-3 You’re more ethical than most webmasters, but is this because you dismissed the black hat approach as underhand, or wouldn’t know where to start? Either way, we congratulate you (and are in this group ourselves too).

4-6 Are you trying to be black or white hat? It isn’t clear from your answers. This suggests either a carefully conceived strategy [dubbed ‘grey hat’] or a ‘try anything’ approach that could do with some direction, before you get into trouble.

7-8 Do you realise how dangerous your dubious tactics are? If not, you are in for a shock. All it takes is a jealous competitor to report you and a ban could soon follow. We suggest cleaning up your act while you still can…

9-10 You’re as black hat as they come and are could also be using scummy techniques that we (almost) dare not mention here (see below). You are at serious risk of being banned by Google but then for a pro like isn’t that just an occupational hazard?

10+ Of course, if you really are a black hat spammer – and not just an everyday webmaster dabbling with the dark side – then all of the above will look pretty tame to you. Equally, however, if automated blogspam (commenting or mass creation), DNS subdomain hijacking and cross site scripting are your sort of thing then you don’t need us to tell you how black hat you really are!

What’s Your Score?

[poll id=”1″]