Nothing like "whitehat" exists! Every SEO work is black hat, no difference. For google only whitehat is no SEO work at all. If everything is natural and not even 1 link is put on to gain ranking boost, thats the real whitehat. Everything what SEO companies do it black hat to google, no matter if its penalized or not. And every google update is changing the rules, so whats not penalized today, may be penalized tomorrow. I'm not against black hat, as we all do or try doing SEO work, I just hate when people confuse newbies with the words whitehat. Spamming boards with 10000 member profiles is definitely not natural google ranking boost(again, I'm not against it).
While some part of your statement is true and I understand your frustration about this subject, there are things to be done to improve SEO that can be considered whitehat. Let's talk a little about what "natural" means. Natural does not mean "Never promote your website, wait for people to come from nowhere". Even if you have the greatest product, to get people to hear about it you need other people to recommend it. To get other people to recommend it you have to promote it in the first place. Talking about SEO, if for example you have a website where people can lookup an IP Addres to find the exact location, it is natural to make your title tag "IP Address locator" or "IP Address Lookup". In the first place you want them to understand what the website is about. In the second place, you have to think for the search engine too. If you think that a keywords might is searched more in Google, is natural to have that keyword as title. If people are searching more for that keyword means that more people use that keyword to describe your action. However, it is unnatural to have a title that attract more searches but has little to do with your website. It is artificial to bold every appearance of that keyword in every article on your website only to improve your rankings in search engines. If we talk about on page SEO, there are natural things like title, headlines, making sure that both search engines and visitors understand your text and what is it about. On the other hand, off page SEO is different, but not so complicated. If you build links to attract visitors means that you promote your website, not that you are doing blackhat. Blackhat can be considered links that never bring visitors but are there only for search engines.
I agree to both of you. if there is only white hat then google dont have to change its algorithm. No meaning in marketing your site
If you work at adding quality relevant content, and focus on $$ keywords, that would be whitehat. If you post quality comments or give advice, on relevant forums and blogs, without spamming, that would be whitehat. If you subscribe to Angela and Paul's backlink guides and follow their guidelines, that is blackhat.
whitehat is mean quality content and quality backlink which is value added to your website. Natural doesnt mean do nothing but do something value added to both the site owner and reader
To google it is still black hat. Because there is no reason to post links as keywords and link them to a website other than for SEO purposes. If SEO didn't exist, nobody would do that, they would link their sites naturally as if they were promoting them to others. So its still blackhat. Also google doesn't know whats board spamming and what not. Many times even the moderators don't know that, so how can google's automated system know that? Ford employees don't post on forums so people buy their cars...(just an example)
Natural(to google) is inly on-page optimalization. A SEO company cannot do real whitehat, as if the company is responsible for forum posts for example, even 1, its not natural anymore, its paid for. Natural would be if a real customer came and mentioned a company(which people barely do, they only post to complain about a company), not 1000 forum posts posted within 1 hour from 5 proxy IPs. Also, real customers don't post URLs on forums, most even don't know how, they simply post part of the URL(non-clickable). So no, there is no real natural whitehat SEO.
The problem is see here is mainly with the techniques followed in SEO. I mean without getting into what borders around whitehat or blackhat i think there should be some effective way through which a site doesnt work in grey area in terms of google and still get ratings..
Yes, the goal is to do SEO while not being penalized by any future update, but that is really hard. Not impossible, though. I agree that content quality matters a lot, when it comes to long term success.
Well, that is not true...black hat websites have many top 10 rankings for any keyword. They don't last long, but that doesn't matter as they are replaced by similar websites on new domains and servers.