Gray hat techniques are those that are neither really white nor black hat. Some of these gray hat techniques may be argued either way. These techniques might have some risk associated with them. A very good example of such a technique is purchasing links. The average price for a text link depends on the page rank of the linking page.^{[citation needed]}

While Google is against sale and purchase of links there are people who subscribe to online magazines, memberships and other resources for the purpose of getting a link back to their website.

Another widely used gray hat technique is a webmaster creating multiple 'micro-sites' which he controls for the sole purpose of cross linking to the target site. Since it is the same owner of all the micro-sites, this is a violation of the principles of the search engine's algorithms (by self-linking) but since ownership of sites is not traceable by search engines it is impossible to detect and therefore they can appear as different sites, especially when using separate Class-C IPs.