Gray Hat SEO: What It Is, Techniques, And More (2026 Guide)

We often talk about essential SEO tips and techniques here at BloggersPassion. Do you know why? We know SEO works. It works like a charm and gives fantastic results if done right.

If you’re someone who’s looking for various ways to increase search engine traffic, try the Gray Hat SEO techniques mentioned in this post. First, let’s talk about what gray hat SEO is and the best SEO practices you can implement on your site to skyrocket your search traffic.

So without any ado, let’s talk about Gray hat SEO and its techniques that you can use on your site to grow search traffic.

What is Gray Hat SEO?

If you’ve been into SEO for a while, you may already be well aware of different types of SEO, which are mainly:

Once you start getting good results with white hat SEO, you might want to try some edgeplay techniques to boost your SEO results really quickly. Here’s where gray hat SEO comes into play.

Gray hat SEO mainly involves dubious tactics that some of them could one day become black hat. You can consider these somewhat risky, but they give you tremendous results if you practice them correctly.

Here is the quick explanation:

SEO Type	Meaning	Risk Level	Google-Safe
White Hat SEO	Follows Google’s guidelines and best practices	Low	Yes
Gray Hat SEO	Uses tactics not clearly approved or disapproved by Google	Medium	Unclear
Black Hat SEO	Uses manipulative tactics that violate Google rules	High	No

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Is Grey Hat SEO Illegal?

Grey hat SEO is not illegal, but it combines both white hat and black hat SEO tactics. 

The best example is keyword stuffing, where keywords are excessively and unnaturally used on a page to improve its search rankings.

Also, sometimes, these tactics do not directly violate Google’s guidelines, but they can harm user experience. 

One such example is AI-generated content. Although Google doesn’t automatically penalize AI content, It also doesn’t consider it high-quality because it lacks originality, depth, and the author’s expertise.

Although these tactics are not illegal, there are always some risks involved, including Google penalties and a drop in your website’s search traffic if Google detects them.
That’s why it’s often recommended to stick to ethical white hat SEO practices if you’re planning to build an authoritative website in the long run.

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Is Grey Hat SEO Important? 

Although white hat SEO tactics such as creating high-quality content, building relevant links, etc, are essential for SEO success, they take a lot of time to get results.

Here’s where grey hat SEO tactics come into play, as they can generate quick results.

For instance, a new website might purchase low-quality backlinks to quickly improve its search traffic and attract more visitors.

But remember that relying solely on grey-hat SEO techniques can be extremely risky. This is because search engines like Google constantly roll out and update their existing search algorithms to identify and penalize websites that use such tactics.

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Top 12 Grey Hat SEO Techniques You Can Try in 2026

1. Domain Grabbing

One widely used technique is buying expired domains (also known as domain grabbing), which still works like a charm when done carefully.

Domain grabbing is the process of buying domains to improve your website’s SEO. Domain grabbing is nothing new. Buying expired domains to enhance your website’s backlink profile is one of the most used SEO tactics by a lot of people worldwide.

Domain grabbing can be of two types.

1. Buying expired domains
2. Buying new domains

The first one is widely popular because you can buy authority-expired domain names that already have a good backlink profile and some trustworthiness. When you buy those expired domain names to link back to your blog posts or home page, you’ll definitely get a boost in your search engine rankings.

Although it’s not recommended to buy a ton of expired domains just to increase your website’s SEO. But buying highly relevant and significant backlink profiles from expired domain names every now and then can definitely help you grow your website’s rankings on search engines like Google.

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2. Cloaking

Cloaking is a popular grey-hat technique in SEO, which involves showing users one version of a page while presenting search engines with another.

It’s a grey-hat tactic because it misleads search engine crawlers into thinking the content on a page is about a specific topic when it’s actually about something else. 

For example, showing a page about “WordPress SEO plugins” to search engines while showing a page about casino gambling to users.

The above example illustrates how a grey-hat tactic might mislead search engines into ranking a page higher for a relevant keyword (e.g., “WordPress SEO plugins”), even though the actual content is unrelated to the topic.

Although cloaking is still a common practice to boost search rankings, it can lead to penalties from search engines.

What are the standard cloaking practices?

Here are some of the cloaking practices most website owners use to improve their search rankings.

1. Hidden Text Cloaking: This is probably the easiest form of cloaking, where website owners use small text hidden inside the content. This means the hidden text is visible only to search engine bots, not to users. It is usually done by setting the font size to 0 or by positioning the text off-screen with CSS. 

2. IP Cloaking: This is one of the most common forms of cloaking in SEO. This happens when a web server delivers a specific web page based on the visitor’s IP address. It serves different content to a search engine crawler and a website visitor.

3. JavaScript Cloaking: In this type of cloaking, the website uses JavaScript to load content, which is only visible to website visitors with JavaScript enabled. So the website owner may show hidden paragraphs filled with keyword stuffing only to visitors with JavaScript enabled.

Here’s the thing: some forms of cloaking are okay, like showing different content to people using phones or computers. This is okay if the main context of the page is the same and doesn’t trick search engines. 

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3. Web 2.0 for building links

Web 2.0 also falls under gray-hat SEO techniques because users can generate, tweak, and edit content using Web 2.0 directories, submission sites, forums, etc. So let’s now talk about what it’s all about and how you can use Web 2.0 for SEO and building links.

Web 2.0 sites work better when you’re focusing on increasing your user engagement instead of solely focusing on getting traffic. So try to stay active on web 2.0 platforms such as Quora, Medium, or other social networking sites instead of just promoting your posts for more traffic or SEO benefits.

Web 2.0 (the 2nd generation) consists mostly of dynamic information, where users can modify content to improve it.

For example, you can edit Wikipedia pages if you find something misleading on a page where you’ve better knowledge. That comes under Web 2.0 because you can tweak the content.

What are the benefits of Web 2.0?

Since all of Web 2.0 allows user-generated content, it has the following noticeable benefits.

• Link benefits: Obviously, people use Web 2.0 mainly for building links. Although most of the links that you get from Web 2.0 are nofollow, they are still valuable because you need diversified links while growing your backlink profile, as you can’t only build do-follow links. And a few sites and blog directories from Web 2.0 give you potential do-follow links as well, which are great for increasing your website’s SEO and rankings.
• Quality traffic: Most user-generated platforms send you qualified visitors to your website, which is really great for increasing your overall website conversion rates. Make sure to spend time on the platforms where most users are active (for example, Quora, where you can also add links to your content).

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4. The usage of PBN

There’s a huge debate whenever someone talks about PBN. So let’s talk about using PBNs to see whether you can use them for effective link building and to increase your website’s SEO.

PBN stands for Private Blog Network, a popular link-building strategy. With the introduction of the Google Penguin update, most people stopped using PBN.

Here are a few tips if you want to build your own PBN

• Find great expired domains with high DA and backlink profiles to start creating single-page websites relevant to your primary website’s content.
• Never automate your content creation process. Instead, create a single-page website with beneficial and relevant content.
• Make sure to use link-building tactics such as broken-link methods, guest posting, blogger outreach, etc., to start attracting more links to your PBN sites so they become valuable SEO assets for you in the long run.

If you don’t want to build your own PBN, you can get help from other Private Blogging Networks, where you need to pay for links to your website. Most of them are ineffective, and only a few PBN networks offer highly relevant, useful links that can improve your SEO.

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5. Find the perfect keyword density

Everyone knows keyword stuffing is a BAD SEO practice. But what if we say, careful keyword stuffing is good for increasing your organic traffic and search engine rankings?

Yes, keyword stuffing is bad, and you should absolutely avoid it at all costs, but if you are maintaining the perfect keyword density, then you can reap the best results from your keyword optimization.

For example, if you’re writing a 1000-word article, use your primary keyword at least 3 to 4 times to increase its organic rankings. Make sure to use your primary keyword in the following places;

• Title tag
• Image alt tag
• H2 and h3 tags
• URL
• Beginning and ending of your content

We highly recommend starting with a great SEO optimization plugin like Rank Math, which offers excellent features to easily optimize your content for your target keywords.

What is the perfect keyword density?

Keyword density is simply the percentage of how many times a keyword appears on a web page. A good keyword density is 1% which means the keyword you are trying to rank for appears at least once in every 100 words you write.

That means, 1% keyword density contains 10 keywords for every 1000-word article.

But if you want to be on the safer side, make sure to keep your keyword density around 0.5% which means it appears only 5 times in a 1000-word article. Here’s a great video by Matt Cutts on ideal keyword density.

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6. Use social bookmarking sites

Excessive submission of your website links (new posts, old posts, other blog pages on your site) on social bookmarking sites falls under gray-hat SEO, but you can stay safe by limiting your submissions to 1 or 2.

That means if you’re submitting your latest posts or any other posts just once across all the social bookmarking sites, it will not harm or hurt your search rankings. In fact, it gives a little boost in your search rankings as you’ll be getting decent traffic if done right.

Check out some of the major social bookmarking sites where you can safely submit your latest blog posts to get more links (although most of them are nofollow, they still add value to your website’s SEO).

Essential Tips for Social Bookmarking Submissions

1. Engagement matters

Social bookmarking works better when you focus on building engagement with other bloggers in your industry.

How can you expect better SEO results when you are only using social bookmarking sites for self-promotion? So make sure to go easy with social bookmarking sites and start engaging with other bloggers through them.

2. Use unique titles and descriptions

One of the most common mistakes many people make while promoting their content on social bookmarking sites is that they use the same headings and meta descriptions.

Make sure to create unique headings and descriptions when promoting your content on social bookmarking sites.

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7. Link exchange

Again, most people think link exchange falls under black hat SEO, but it doesn’t. It falls under gray hat SEO, and let us explain a bit about it.

• Automatic link exchanging falls under the black hat SEO technique, while
• Exchanging links manually belongs to gray hat SEO

What is link exchange?

Exchanging links with other websites or blogs is known as link exchange, which is NOT a white hat SEO technique that mostly comes under gray hat SEO. Many people avoid it for the sake of NOT getting penalized by Google.

How to exchange links without getting penalized by Google?

If done right, you can use link exchanges to carefully build backlinks from a variety of sources. Here are a few tips that you can keep in mind to safely perform link exchanges without getting penalised.

Build a small tribe

You can build a list of all the relevant blogs in your industry and then start contacting each and every blogger to promote each other’s content.

You don’t need a big list of people to build a tribe, as you can find 10 to 20 bloggers in your industry to form a group on Facebook, then start helping each other out by sharing, linking, and commenting on each other’s stuff regularly.

Link out to other bloggers frequently

One of the best ways to attract links from other websites is to link out to them frequently in your content. Whenever you link to another website, connect with them on social media or via email so they know you are helping by linking. If you do it frequently, you can also ask them for a retweet or a link back to your content.

If they find your content engaging and valuable, they will definitely link back to it. You can also read more about how to do blogger outreach for getting links from other sites.

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8. Submit your site to web directories

There are a ton of web directories available on the internet that you can use to get high-quality and relevant backlinks to your website for free.

What is a web directory?

Directory submission is the process of listing your website on various directories under a specified category to build backlinks to your site.

Although there are a ton of useless web directory submission sites that you should avoid, if you do careful research, you will find plenty of useful web directories that you can use to increase your website’s SEO.

Here is a list of free directory submission where you can submit your website to attract more backlinks.

We have also created a list of blog submission sites with a domain authority (DA) of over 40. Make sure to use that list to sign up for free and start promoting your latest blog posts to improve your SEO.

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9. Multiple social media accounts

Did you know that social signals affect your website’s SEO? Yes, it’s true, just have a look at the following illustration by Search Metrics.

The above illustration shows the importance of social signals from Facebook and Twitter, which strongly correlate with good rankings in Google’s index.

• The no of Facebook shares a page has received appears to have the strongest association (a correlation of 0.37).
• Twitter is far behind Facebook, but is still the 6th strongest factor on the Searchmetrics list of Google ranking factors with a correlation of 0.25.

How to get Social Signals for your Site?

All you need is to create multiple dummy accounts across all major social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, and add a bio and a picture to start promoting your own content.

That way, you can instantly get more Facebook shares, Pinterest pins, retweets, etc, whenever you publish a new article on your site (you can use social media tools like Buffer, HootSuite, etc, to automate your social media post scheduling).

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10. Build microsites

Building microsites to generate links for a primary website falls under grey hat SEO, and if done right, it can give you a lot of search engine visibility and high-quality backlinks to your primary site without violating Google guidelines.

A microsite can be either an individual web page or a set of web pages that acts as a separate entity for a website, brand or agency. A microsite typically lives on its own domain, but some exist as a subdomain that can work as an extension to a particular brand or domain.

How to build microsites?

If you are wondering about how to build microsites to boost your website rankings on Google, here are a few tips that most SEO experts use.

• Before you start building microsites to get more links and traffic to your primary sites, study the successful microsites to find out how they operate and work well in search engines. Here’s a great list of microsites compiled by HubSpot.
• Don’t duplicate your content. One of the biggest mistakes most people make when building microsites is automating their content process, either by using automated content generation plugins or by creating duplicate content. Don’t do it. Instead, create unique content that is relevant to the main topic of your website (so the links will be highly relevant and help you increase your website’s SEO).
• Use a proper web hosting choice to run even your microsites. We highly recommend WPX hosting as it is one of the best hosting choices that offers speed, reliability, and security.
• Start small when you’re just starting out. Don’t try to build too many microsites at once. Start with 1 microsite, make the most out of it, and then focus on building more microsites to boost your primary website’s SEO and traffic.

Bonus Read: Explore hosting that supports your efforts with our good web hosting recommendations.

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11. Content Spinning

Content spinning (or article spinning) is a widespread grey-hat SEO practice that reuses someone else’s content by changing its wording.

Creating unique and engaging content on any topic takes a lot of time. Here’s where content spinning comes into play. By simply changing a few words and phrases, you can quickly turn one article into hundreds of different articles.

Remember, it’s an unethical tactic, as this process mainly creates low-quality, duplicate content, which can be penalized by Google’s updates.

How to use content spinning?

Here are some of the effective ways to do that.

1. Create Variations for Different Platforms: Instead of article spinning, it’s better to create variations of an article for various platforms like social media, email newsletters, or blogs. For example, you can make an effective LinkedIn post or a more extended version to turn it into a tutorial or a how-to guide.

2.  Repurpose: If you’ve identified a great piece of content on other websites, instead of spinning its content, repurpose it into a video, podcast, or an infographic. If possible, take permission from the original content creator before doing it.

3.  Opposite approach: Let’s say you want to spin an article on “5 ways to drive more website traffic.” You can change the order of the points, reword the headings, replace synonyms, or add or remove examples. Even better, rewrite from a different point of view.

The topic on “How to Build Backlinks” can be rewritten from a different perspective, such as “What Not to Do When Building Backlinks”.

Here are a few examples of how to take the opposite approach while content spinning;

• Topic: Best Practices for Local SEO
• Opposite Approach: Local SEO Mistakes to Avoid

• Topic: How to Use Social Media for SEO
• Opposite Approach: Social Media Mistakes That Hurt Your SEO

Be careful with content spinning and avoid overdoing it. It’s always a good idea to create high-quality, original content if you want to avoid Google penalties.

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12. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is the practice of copying others’ content and publishing it on your own website as if it’s your original work. It also refers to identical content appearing on multiple web pages.

Duplicate content is an excellent example of a grey hat SEO technique.

Google doesn’t penalize websites for having duplicate content.

However, duplicate content can still harm your SEO. Here’s why: 

• It confuses search engines to choose which version to show in search results. Most of the time, Google selects the original piece, potentially lowering rankings for websites that have copied content.
• It can lead to a bad user experience when people find the same information on multiple sites.
• It can also harm your website’s authority and credibility in the long run.
• Above all, original authors may take legal action against those who plagiarize their content.

How can you take advantage of duplicate content?

Here are some of the best ways to use this grey hat tactic to your advantage.

1. Create a unique angle: Instead of directly copying and pasting content from other websites, you can rephrase it in your own words, create a unique content angle, and use an engaging writing tone to create a unique piece.

For instance, if you find an informative article on “SEO tips”, you could write a follow-up post that offers a different set of tips or includes additional resources. 

2. Content syndication: Content syndication is a widely popular tactic that involves republishing content from one website on another site. 

Most news websites, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Reuters, often use this tactic. They aggregate news articles from various sources to reach a wider audience and increase their search traffic.

3. Tailor content for different audiences: Duplicate content can also be used to target different customers without having to create entirely new content. 

Most businesses often use duplicate content to create separate product pages for different price points. For example, a smartphone manufacturer might create individual product pages for their base, mid-range, and flagship models.

Source: Google Search Control

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Should You Use Grey Hat SEO Techniques In 2026?

You should not rely solely on grey hat SEO techniques to boost your website’s search rankings in 2026.

You should always focus your time and efforts on implementing white hat SEO techniques. It’s because white hat SEO techniques are sustainable and can help you generate more search traffic in the long run.

Creating helpful content, optimizing your website for the right keywords, and building links naturally can give you the best SEO results.

Yes, white hat SEO may take longer than grey hat tactics, but it’s not risky and will help you improve your website’s authority.

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Conclusion On Grey Hat SEO Techniques For 2026

There are no specific rules for ranking a website on Google. Yes, there are black-hat, white-hat, and gray-hat SEO techniques you can use to get higher rankings on Google.

But it’s always better to focus on those tactics that don’t get you penalized by Google algorithms. That’s the only way you get better rankings in the long run.

So, what do you think about the gray-hat search engine optimization techniques mentioned here? Do you have any more SEO techniques, tips or tricks in mind? Share your thoughts in the comments below. `

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FAQs On Grey Hat SEO Techniques