White Hat - Ethical Black Hat - Unethical My question how can you say that the link building is ethical or unethical? Directory Submission - ethical or unethical? Social Bookmarking - ethical or unethical? Blog Commenting - ethical or unethical? Link Exchange - ethical or unethical? and others... Please explain...
Opinions are really nothing more than that... go ahead and partake in all those linking strategies and let Google be the final Judge... and believe me, anybody replying to this thread will be offering nothing more that their opinion without actual proof! I can guarantee that none of those strategies will do you any harm... however, I can't guarantee that they will help either.... Only Google can make that guarantee... and you'll never know until you try!
There are really obvious black hat techniques such as text that is only visible to the spider. Then there are grey areas can we call them Grey Hat techniques like Doorway pages. In theory there should be nothing wrong with doorways but they are open to abuse and so Google penalises them. It's best to stick to whiter than white White Hat techniques and all of the techniques that you mentioned are fine if done properly. I notice that a lot of people, when optimising webpages, tend to get bogged down in detail and get their blinkers on, only thinking about it from the spider's point of view. It's best to think about your content and how your visitors will see it. When posting on blogs, or indeed this forum, for instance you should be thinking about the value that you can add rather than what you can receive (e.g. link juice).
Black Hat SEO is anything that violates the rules set by Search Engines specially those regulations set by Google. Unfortunately, i couldn't find any resources for Bing and Yahoo!. Too bad. I want to read their rules for their search engines. Link Exchange is unethical. It violates Google's rule on reciprocal links.
You can get inbound links from all the methods you have listed except link exchanges. Google don't like link exchanges. You can do it at moderate level but not excessively. I think you should read this http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 If you go against any of the rules stated in link schemes considered as black hat.
If you did it entirely Google's way, you make your site and just sit back and wait for other people to spontaneously link to you, maybe submitting for a link on dmoz and paying the £300 or whatever it is for a 'review' from Yahoo directory. One you go out and there and actively try and get links, it's probably grey hat. Do anything to only get a link, definately grey hat. If you've put time and effort and money into a website, who the hell is just just going to sit back and wait and pray that visitors find your content 'compelling' ?
It is SEO that generally 'goes by the book'. It is plain to see (visible), not sneaky, hidden or malicious.
Has nothing to do with Ethics at all. You either play by the rules or you don't. Is Google Ethical? Telling Webmasters not to buy links, but they make their income off of Advertisers buying links through their network? They don't make content. They scrape it! That is the Search Engines job to scrape and organize content. Your job is to play by the rules... and still make money. You can choose to bend or break the rules and make money too. Just don't complain when things go south.
This is a good point, it's not a question of ethics, but adhering to rules. There is nothing unethical about a link exchange, it's like swapping business cards in real life and putting them in your lobby. Whenever you try to trick a search engine, or doing something you consider a "trick" or added edge, it's probably black hat.
All SEO is blackhat. SEO is manipulating ("optimizing") your search engine ranking. To differentiate with artificial nomenclatures (blackhat vs. whitehat) is just silly.
White Hat = Making sure search engines crawl your site effectively Black Hat = Finding ways to trick the search engine. That's kind of like saying you have a store, and sweeping out front and cleaning the windows is the same as putting a detour sign on the sidewalk pointing people to go in the door. (not saying anything bad about black hat, just explaining the differences)
No difference - both are "manipulating" your ranking in the search engine (otherwise, why would you care if a bot was crawling your site?).
Google is not the arbiter of ethics. Do what you can to get your traffic. White hat / Black hat is just a label.