Grey hat SEO is industry slang for optimization tactics placed between white hat SEO (within search engine guidelines) and black hat SEO (deliberate manipulation). There is no formal definition, and Google does not use the term in its documentation.
What counts as grey hat?
The label depends on who uses it. Sources usually list tactics whose rule status looks unclear or whose violation is hard to prove, such as paid guest posts, reciprocal link exchanges or lightly automated content.
Google’s own reference point is its spam policies. They name specific practices, among them cloaking, keyword stuffing, hidden text, link spam, scaled content abuse and expired domain abuse. According to Google, a site that violates them can rank lower or not appear in results at all, and manual actions are possible. Because many tactics are named explicitly, the gray area is smaller than the term suggests. Whether a tactic is “grey” often reflects how much risk someone is willing to take rather than a rule.
Example
A company pays a blogger for an article that links to its product page. Google’s link spam policy lists buying or selling links for ranking purposes as a violation, and links in paid content are acceptable only when marked with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored". The same purchase can therefore be advertising or link spam, depending on how it is implemented.
Sources
- Spam policies for Google web search – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Grey Hat SEO – Ahrefs glossary (secondary)ahrefs.com
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