SEOs wear many hats. They could wear Black hats, which means they will use underhanded tactics such as cloaking or doorway pages to trick search engine agents and achieve high rankings in a short period of time. White Hat SEOs are the good old ethical search engine optimization experts who focus on ethical tactics such as title optimization and link building to achieve the highest ranking possible for themselves and their clients. But while it is fairly easy to figure out if a tactic is Black Hat or White Hat SEO, Gray Hat SEO tactics are the ones that one should worry about. Gray Hat search engine gurus claim that they use border line tactics to achieve the best SERP rankings possible in the shortest period of time. In my opinion there are three types of Gray Hat SEO tactics:

1. Light-Gray
2. Heavy-Gray
3. Gray-Gray

 Light Gray tactics are simply White Hat tactics, but ambitious SEO professionals may want to claim that they know more than an everyday SEO professional. So they claim to be pushing the line and coming up with innovative solutions. But what they are basically doing is dressing White Hat tactics in Gray to either attain more cash or claim superiority over ethical SEOs.

Heavy-Gray SEOs are straight Black Hat gurus who do the exact opposite to what Light Gray SEOs do. They claim BlackHat tactics to be completely ethical. I have had instances where these guys have completely dodged questions about their tactics and have claimed that they are trying to push the envelop, knowing where the line is that they should not cross. I remember asking one of these guys about why other reputable companies were calling their recommendations as pure Black Hat, and the best answer they could give me was that others were trying to discredit them and take business away from them.

Gray-Gray SEO professionals are those SEOs who know enough to be dangerous but do not necessarily know all they need to know to avoid crossing the no-no line. Some of these guys are just ignorant which makes them even more dangerous as they do not know what they are doing is actually harmful to their clients.

In general, you know what you get from a White Hat and Black Hat SEO, but a Gray Hat can be tough to deal with. Some of these guys are ignorant. Some of them are plain arrogant. The rest are sneaky. If you are a reputable company that relies on SEO to generate a significant amount of your business, you may want to stay away from Gray Hats. Being conservative is not going to kill!