What is white hat and black hat seo in plain english?

There's a big grey zone in between, which is where most of the arguments happen. Buying expired domains just to redirect them, paying for "guest posts" that are really link placements, that sort of thing. Google's spam policies name a lot of these directly now, so it's worth reading them once instead of guessing where the line is.

White hat = making the site genuinely better and following Google's guidelines (useful content, fast pages, earning links). Black hat = trying to trick the ranking system, like buying links, keyword stuffing, or showing Google different content than visitors see. Black hat can work for a while, but one spam update or manual action and the rankings disappear.