I do visit a few black hat forums and the general consensus is that Google particuarly has moved on past this point. Apparently sites have been banned for this kind of thing on a regular basis. If this is because Google can recognise a disproportionate number of links coming from sources such as these, or though complaints directly to Google is unclear. Though it certainly isn't a long term recepie for success. Though short term gains can be made out of it.
Also if you get caught red handed doing blackhat, Google keeps a grudge on you. Many of the times even your clean whitehat sites can get wiped as well because they are owned by you. Though Blgdaddy never admits, they keep on banning the sites manually of big blackhat spammers.
Although I am not really considering doing any spamming its always been my belief that to be a good seo you need to understand how people spam the search engines. If a blackhat can get a site to page 1 of google for a really competitive term by spamming then there are lessons to be learned by the white hats as well.
Exactly, there are concepts that are used by black hat spammers that you can equally well apply to white or grey hat techniques.
I wrote a small blog post about my Black hat experiment: http://www.marcuswestberg.com/black-hat-seo/ Have fun!
I agree with your findings. Balck hat works great in the short term, but the sites will be flagged sooner rather than later by either Google or a competitor. Black hat SEO'er have to work just as hard to stay ahead of this, though some of them are obviously making some very good money indeed.
Yeh, I do some grey-hat SEO...but the more SEO I do, the paler gray my hat becomes. It's getting awful close to snow-white these days. Black hat is just not worth it.
sooo many morons try to spam my blog every day hey great site! are usually the comments, it's very obvious and transparent
When I optimize a site for a client I will go through the top positions and flag ALL black hat SEO sites. I recommand that everybody does the same. The Internet is cluutered enough!
Ouch. That's why I suggest the following : Always use REAL customized content. Make sure your material is READABLE Make sure your material is actually USEFUL Avoid spammy links and linking patterns
Referral spam is pretty much dead, thank goodness. However, there's a new variant method targetting blog owners that's being practiced currently. Very annoying. I see it working once and the webmaster will probably be too pissed to click any more links.