Illegal means you could be arrested. You cannot be arrested for blackhat SEO man, that's crazy. You could get banned, have someone write your ISP, get a few nastygrams, but you ain't getting arrested. The big "fear", if you want to call it that, is that you get the url in question blacklisted from search engines, namely Google. Big deal. Ain't gonna kill anyone and you are not gonna go to jail, get sued, or nothing of the sort. That's silly. If you look into almost all big business, the founders pulled sneaky-pete, underhanded, cut-throat tactical deals that made them wealthy. It's called Capitalism. Our greedy monetary system thrives on it. Fear of the unknown is always suspect to people. And yes, getting banned would douche your business prospects. But sometimes the risk pays off in spades. It is a matter of managing risk.
Don't be silly - paying for digging or stumbling is not illegal - are you going to report someone to the Police for it? It's against the Terms of those sites, and they are likely to close your account with them, and ban your site - but they're not going to call the Police or take you to court.
people used blackhat technique but it should be at some level but if u try to fool search engien completely then u misunderstand thing
I dont think that unless you hack into someone else's account or trick people into getting money with false promises you wont get into trouble. using black hat techniques will most probably increase your chance of being banned from google. That will be more brutal shock than getting a law suit for 1 million $
The issue here is the misuse of the term "illegal". Against Google/Yahoo Terms of Service is just against a company policy. We are misunderstanding words here. I think this post has run it's course, no real information is coming out of it. The guy asked a question about blackhat being illegal. The answer is no... Asked and answered. Google whines about it, but Google whines about everything.
illegal as per laws of google, else no problem. As G is god atm, i would advice you to stay away from this blackhat techniques.
no it doesn't. Illegal means 'against the law'. Perhaps those of you who think it is 'illegal' would like to point out the law it's breaking. And the statute book it's written on. And the jurisdictions it applies to. Last time I looked, Google was a corporation not a law making organization like a government
This thread has the most banned posters per-capita that I have seen to date for as few posts as there are on it. If I felt I needed a Black Hat approach... I would go for it. If I knew any good Black Hat guys... I would hire them. Most of them are spammers unfortunately, not real Black Hat pros. . There is the dark side of SEO and that is not necessarily spam. There is actually a legit method of Black Hat SEO practices but you don't believe it. And for the last time, look up the word illegal and get your vocabulary straight. It's not illegal. Against certain "search engines" rules does not qualify as anything punishable in a court of law. Apples/Oranges. Legal/Against company policy. Not really in the same league. We could go round and round about the definition of illegal all night, doubt you would see the light there. Let's just say that if you like using Black Hat or Grey Hat or White Hat, just do it right and get what you need done without whining about it. You get banned from Google... So what? At least you did something. 99% of Internet properties do nothing, so at least you tried.
just like in unix vulnerabilities, the whitehats n the blackhats. in this case, blackhat is illegal, blackhats r cracking servers without owners permission. But if you reffer to an ebook, it might not be illegal. for example , posting on classfield ads as a girl, asking them to mail you for further chat, and use an auto responder on your mail address to direct them to some adult affiliate website IS BLACKHAT but its not illegal.
blackhat is not illegal...it's just unethical IMO...but who cares about ethics when all you want is to make money as much as possible...i believe internet marketing is all about making money...not making friends ...
Blackhat is not illegal in terms of law, like spamming, but it's against TOS of most big services, like Google's, Myspace (spamming on profiles etc) and it's generally unethical and more and more sites fight against blackhat - like Google fights with splogs, cloaking, keyword stuffing etc.