This has been bothering me for a while. Have we now seen a death of the Black-hat SEO guy? Much of their practices are not affective, so it would be logical to assume that this is the end of it.
I read up on the practices, and all seem to have a negative affect with Google. So I could only think this is now gone.
Yes - that’s why SitePoint has two separate forums - one for internet marketing and one for SEO.
SEO is to Internet marketing what a Robin Reliant is to a car.
Simply comical. You just make this stuff up as you go along don’t you. Now SEO and marketing are different things apparantly.
I would dearly love to see you post this stuff on a forum dedicated to SEO bearing in mind the number of times I’ve been ripped a new one by people who really know what they’re talking about and I actually have practical experience of SEO, unlike you…
I know of quite a few if you want to find out for yourself? I think Sitepoint, and specifically the SEO forum here, could only benefit from you having that experience. If you really care about the quality of posting here you’ll at least consider it.
No I am saying the exact opposite (since all that doing those things will achieve is to get the site banned from the search engine results completely).
What I am saying is that if you think about the real people who can benefit from the site and work on creating links that they will see and want to follow to get to your site that the search engines will then give the site a more appropriate ranking without you needing to do anything specific for the search engines at all.
You should always work on what needs to be done to make things easier for real people. SEO is only one of the thousands of marketing techniques you can use to get your pages in front of the people you want to see them and if you apply the many other marketing methods appropriately then your pages should get close to where they really deserve to be in the results.
Remember that it isn’t your opinion of what rank your page deserves that matters or even that of the search engine. It is what the people doing the searching think that is the only thing that matters. If the search engines start getting it wrong too often them people will stop using them to search for whatever it is they are looking for.
The search engines consider all SEO to be black hat because SEO is attempting to manipulate the position in the search results specifically. The search engines are basically right in that opinion because anything that isn’t black hat SEO is really aimed more at the people who will see and follow the links created because the links are valuable in themselves even before you take into account the benefit that those links give you with the search engines. In other words all white hat SEO is a side effect of genuine marketing efforts that are not directed specifically at the search engines but which are instead directed at the real people who can benefit from finding the page.
You need to start thinking in terms of marketing and advertising and forget about SEO as with a proper marketing campaign the necessary white hat work that will get your pages the rank they deserve should happen automatically (or at least it would if it weren’t for all the black hat SEO from people trying to get pages listed higher than they deserve or who have no idea of how to properly go about promoting the site to the real people who are its target audience).
Those doing SEO rather than doing marketing are either misguided novices or scammers. To get your site the rankings it deserves you don’t want an SEO expert, you need a marketing expert who will carry out a whole range of promotional activities which as a side effect will get the appropriate search engine rankings with the added benefit that the ranking achieved is more likely to go up rather than down as the search engines identify and eliminate the higher ranking pages that are only there because of what the search engines consider to be black hat SEO (and they consider all SEO to be black hat by definition since all SEO is intended to directly manipulate the search engines and the people who own the search engines who are the only ones whose opinion matters regarding what black hat SEO is and they are constantly working to eliminate its effect).
After all do you really want the search engines visiting your site constantly and no real people or do you really want the real people to be the ones visiting.
I have come across a lot of people who have paid an SEO expert to get their site higher rankings who have suffered significantly as a result of scammers who have concentrated on trying to trick the search engines rather than establishing a proper marketing campaign.
Depends what you consider black hat SEO. Link manipulation, or creating unnatural links pointing to your website is considered “Black Hat SEO”. Well guess what, when you create a nice article and submit it to a directory, and link back to your website, you are creating an unnatural link, technically that is “Back Hat SEO”. Now show me a one person that does not do it??? There is always an ongoing debate about what people consider “Black Hat Seo”.
You sound like you just came to that conclusion which wouldn’t surprise since you don’t actually do SEO for a living. It would be nice though if, as an advisor representing sitepoint, you gave a little more thought to your ideas before posting in the SEO forum instead of stating them as if they were fact (like in the Google Page Rank thread) when they’re actually just your opinions, and not always very well informed. The only time you’ve ever posted some of your own experiences with your own pages ranking without you doing any SEO you actually managed to contradict something you’d said in an earlier thread, something which I’ve repeatedly tried to get you to explain with no success.
As I postulated in the post directly above yours, there is no such thing as white hat and black hat because there’s no such thing as SEO that Google approves of. Before you can disprove that, you have to define SEO, let’s hear it…
The main goal of the people working on the search engine algorithms is to identify and eliminate sites using black hat techniques from their search results.
Black hat seo is always going to be around as long as seo is. Once google and others pick up on what people are doing they will find other ways to do something different, it is just a continuous cycle.
I have come across a lot of people who have paid an SEO expert to get their site higher rankings who have suffered significantly as a result of scammers who have concentrated on trying to trick the search engines rather than establishing a proper marketing campaign.
I agree with you to a point, but you can’t call editing the web-page title, or keyword density, internet marketing, it has to be called search engine optimization. Internet Marketing is very broad and covers a selection of topics. I have heard a few horrid stories too, one person called it dead money, another said it was like throwing money in the air and hoping for it do transform. I am sure they have a point to some degree.
Good point, it’s only the Anti-spam team that work on catching people gaming the system.
There’s no such thing as Black Hat SEO anyway.
If you put your link in directories and so forth, then they have more chance of staying. If someone is using something close to a link farm, then your link will only stay there as long as you keep paying him for optimization because he is the controller of these links. Google cannot really stop these, because people can make them appear organically, like JJMcClure stated.
There are many practices that are effective, that are borderline SEO. It involves building your own websites on other IP addresses, and linking back to your
money sites. Trust me, it’s borderline 
At least, if Matt Cutts saw you doing it, he’d probably pull out the ruler, and slap your wrist. Maybe… lol.
But in terms of Blackhat SEO, it’s never really been alive. I mean, sure you can make a lot of money short term, but in the long run, you’re doing a bunch of
work now, that will simply be removed by Google, later. 
My take is that there’s no such thing as black hat. Calling stuff ‘black’ and ‘white’ hat is like saying things are legal and illegal and Google doesn’t work like that.
There are a whole bunch of signals that Google rewards with good rankings and there are different ways to spoof them. Some ways are so close to the ‘natural’ deserved signals that Google won’t notice you artificially created them and you’ll rank well long term and some are weak short term techniques that Google easily spots and penalises you for.
Anything you would black black hat I would describe as a short term technique but using the term ‘white hat’ implies that Google doesn’t mind it and they do, they want sites to do well because they deserve to, not because you know how to build links.
i think black hat seo is still alive. it comes in many forms. others think that it is a white hat but the truth some of them are black hat.
For most common queries there are probably 1000 pages that will satisfy the user’s needs.
Of those 1000 pages, only 10 will be displayed to the average user, who will only click 2-3 of them.
So if a “black hat” page is displayed, and it meets the user’s needs then the search engine should be quite happy to have it displayed as the user will be quite happy as well.
This black hat/white hat BS is a waste of everyone’s time. As Malcolm X once said “Get your pages ranked by any means necessary”.
How do you think sites rank to be displayed in Google Instant?
Let me give you a hint, SEO.
Yay for a voice of reason…
i thinking not only Seo black hat wil die.
After Google Instant work i see SEO will kill.
So in your definition it’s ok to spam links around, keyword stuff, create flogs and link networks so long as the page that is benefiting “deserves” to rank higher?
no, sorry, that’s not true
the main goal of the people working on the search engine algorithms is to ensure that the most relevant results are returned for searches
eliminating sites using black hat techniques is an ancillary strategy to achieving the main goal