Blackhat can make you a lot of money in a short time. It just increases your chance of getting you banned.
I reckon blackhat methods are short cuts and tricks to get quick money with little effort. Well, you reap what you sow. Why don't spend the time to learn and sow well for the long term harvest without backfire?
I'm thinking about blackhat as well. There is piles of webmasters who use blackhat but do it carefully so they actually do not get banned. So following the white hat - what are our chances to win against them. For example if they using fanthomas or search engine cloaker - 2 which get you banned very, very rare -we don't have a chance to win. There is no way that I can build 600 subpages with great content and high keyword density. 1. That would take years 2. How many pages can you write about same subject with the same keyword? - there is a limit It's like taking a part in the marathon. If half of the contestants will hitchhike - do you have a chance to come first? And by the way I think the worse blackhat user is Google. How can you follow their stupid rules if they not making any sense? I have 5% density on 1 keyword and my score is 4/10 - not relevant, I just added another which is repeated on my page exactly twice and in the last 3 days it reached 7/10. Both keywords have huge search volume and high cost - but my cost is lower for second one. As I said - Google doesn't make any sense
I am really not concerned with the site cheap domains that gets banned from SE's and you can churn them out in volumes. Now my point is that not many affiliate n/w accept blackhat traffic.
What you do is use your black hat sites to push traffic to your white hat sites (white enough to comply with the affiliate) and convert them there. As far as the affiliate is concerned, your traffic could be coming from Adwords, SERP's or anywhere he doesn't know. So the flow of traffic looks like: 5,000 Black Hat Site >> White Hat Site >> Affiliate So you make a funnel, well so i have heard anyway.
Illegal - It can be, but typically it's not and it all depends on what you do exactly and also depends on the laws on your country or where you operate. If i drive a car at 60 is it illegal? If the road is a 40 zone then yes, but if it's a 60 zone then no. Unethical - Again it depends, things i do every day might be unethical to the pope but to 95% of the population everything i do is ethical. Breaking a "Search engines guidelines" is unethical to them, but if i bought text links and asked my neighbor if it was unethical what would he say? No.
You have to work out your own strategy, if everyone doing black hat followed the same plan or information the method wouldn't be effective. Based on my observations of course.
In the long Run you will make more money with Whitehat then Blackhat. Blackhat is short-term and to tell your the truth its not worth it. You most likely to get banned from programs or sometimes even sued.