I'm trying to eliminate the ground (tagged "Ground") and my player's transform from a simple raycast which rotates the transform on hit; this is basically to stop my player rotating whenever it raycast hits the ground or itself. I have tried:

• hit.collider.gameObject.tag != "Ground" and
• !hit.collider.gameObject.CompareTag("Ground")

to check the ground's tag via raycast hit, but both are causing a NullReferenceException. If I comment out that line in each script there are no errors and the script runs perfectly fine. I have read through almost 2 dozen questions about this both here and on the forums and come up with the two solutions below. So how can I check an objects tag via raycast? These two ways aren't working:

(Method 1)

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class ObstacleAvoidance6 : MonoBehaviour {

    public float turnSpeed = 5;
    RaycastHit hit = new RaycastHit();


    // Use this for initialization
    void Start () {

    }

    // Update is called once per frame
    void Update () {

       if(Physics.Raycast(transform.position, transform.forward, 1)){
         Debug.DrawLine(transform.position, transform.forward, Color.blue);
         if (hit.transform != transform && hit.collider.gameObject.tag != "Ground") {
          transform.Rotate(Vector3.up, 90 * turnSpeed * Time.smoothDeltaTime);
         }
       }
       else {

         transform.position += transform.forward * 1 * Time.deltaTime;
       }
    }
}

(Method 2)

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class ObstacleAvoidance7 : MonoBehaviour {

    public float turnSpeed = 5;
    RaycastHit hit = new RaycastHit();

    // Use this for initialization
    void Start () {
    }

    // Update is called once per frame
    void Update () {

       if(Physics.Raycast(transform.position, transform.forward, 1)){
         Debug.DrawLine(transform.position, transform.forward, Color.blue);
         if (hit.transform != transform && !hit.collider.gameObject.CompareTag("Ground")) {
          transform.Rotate(Vector3.up, 90 * turnSpeed * Time.smoothDeltaTime);
         }
       }
       else {
         transform.position += transform.forward * 1 * Time.deltaTime;
       }
    }
}