What is the Difference Between White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO?
White hat SEO tactics improve your rankings and discoverability in the SERP (search engine results page), while black hat SEO tactics can be flagged by Google as spam, which can lead to further issues like manual actions and deindexation. Some examples of black hat SEO techniques include keywords stuffing, duplicate content, and cloaking.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is a form of identical content creation where content is taken from one source and duplicated onto another source. The length of this duplication can be from a few phrases to full pieces of content; however, it all can be detrimental to a website’s ability to rank.
Duplicate content can also hurt when it’s duplicated on the same domain. Although not as detrimental, duplication can still be the difference between ranking and not.
A white hat SEO alternative to this would be to create unique content. By focusing on creating unique and targeted quality content, there is no need to worry about duplicate content.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is an old black hat SEO tactic that involves injecting targeted keywords into content unnaturally. This method was utilized to manipulate website rankings in the SERP. Google views keyword stuffing in content as irrelevant and bad user experience for readers. Ultimately, this will cause keyword rankings to fall rapidly.

A white hat SEO alternative to this would be to properly utilize keyword injection in a natural and organic manner. By writing properly optimized meta tags that are readable by real people, keyword stuffing is easily avoidable.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique that shows the Google crawler (or spider) a different set of content than the user. This method is considered highly deceptive and cause the page to receive cloaking penalties which can be deleterious not only short term but long-term as well.
Examples of cloaking include hidden content and redirects using JavaScript or utilizing Flash to hide content from the crawler.
A white hat SEO alternative to avoid penalties from cloaking is to utilize HTML for text and HTML5 for any other content that you would otherwise utilize JavaScript or Flash for. By minimizing the risk, you are actively minimizing the chance for manual actions to be taken on your website.