Black Hat SEO

Blackhat SEO = faster, riskier

Whitehat SEO = slow, boring, riddled with myths & fear of the frightening black hats.

Google doesn't approve any method other than just having a site and putting content on it.

Any link building, pinging, RSS feeds, submissions, tools, gimmicks, tricks, is 'frowned upon' by google. If google had it's way there would be no such thing as SEO or link building.

But that's not the way it is, and that's not the way it will ever be. As long as google is sending traffic, there will be people optimizing for search engines.

Google pretends to be the king of white hats, but google has the blackest hat of them all.

I tend not to worry about whether something is 'black hat' or 'white hat' or anywhere in between. I go with what works, and what I feel comfortable doing.

I don't consider sending thousands of unrequested emails to strangers whos addresses you scraped off the internet to be something that's acceptable for my business.

I do consider sending thousands of generic spun comments to blogs that have left their comments on autoapprove to be acceptable, though perhaps not very effective depending on what the purpose of all the commenting is for.

To me, black hat and white hat are essentially the same thing: SEO. Some of it works, this is the stuff I continue to do, some of it doesn't, this is the stuff I stop doing. It's as simple as that for me.