The white hat marketing implies that all SEO activities are carried out while conforming to the guidelines, rules and policies of search engines. It is an ethical guideline since all site managers abide to the written, as well as unwritten rules and guidelines for SEO. Some of these guidelines are: Black hat marketing involves SEO activities that are against the norms of search engines. It is effortful for the search engine alone to distinguish when black hat SEO is applied. Competitors can play a role by reporting cases of black hat marketing to the search engines, who will in turn ban or penalise the webpresence. Despite the risk of ban, marketers still can go for black hat marketing because it helps in boosting up the page location in the search results.

The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date. Site owners started to call back the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an chance for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. By relying so much on factors such as keyword density which were alone within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to change to guarantee their results sites showed the most in hand search results, rather than unconnected articles stuffed with many keywords by unprincipled webmasters. Since the success and quality of a search engine is compulsive by its cognition to make the most relevant results to any given search, allowing those results to be invalid would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by processing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additive factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.