Black Hat VS White Hat question

Joined this forum recently. Loving it so far. Love how active it is.

Anyway. I understand the difference between White and Black hat SEO. But what I'm wondering is does it make sense to use Black hat tactics on sites that you want to be viable for a long period of time? Or is it best to use black hat on sites you wanna turn and burn. Also will google penalize you for being linked to by sites that are very spammy, or will it end up just not counting towards your page rankings?

There is a lot of conflicting information in books, and this forum has so much info I don't know where to start. But a book called outsmarting google says that google secretly uses trust rank and that page rank isn't really that important. But my bottom line question is can black hat be a long term strategy? Or does it require that you constantly make new sites because eventually you're garunteed to be banned?

Blackhat can be a long term strategy, just make sure to leave as few footprints as possible. I.e. fuck using Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Chrome, Google Toolbar, even GMail or Google+.

Yes you can use blackhat for the long term, I use a mix that is much more along the lines of grayhat myself.

As to your question about getting links for spammy sites. It generally should not hurt you. The links just aren't given as much link juice as a solid website would give you. If you could lower your rankings by having links from spammy sites it would actually be a great technique for killing your competition just by spamming their links all over spammy websites, and thus moving yourself up. But, it doesn't work that way. So no, it doesn't hurt your site.

Always be careful using black hat directly on your money site.

Black hat can be used as long term strategy... If you are new to this industry i will say avoid Black Hat...

Just remember one thing to manipulate a law you need to first understand what is law. So start learning SEO then think about what is black hat and what is white hat.

DebtFreeMe said:

Yes you can use blackhat for the long term, I use a mix that is much more along the lines of grayhat myself.

As to your question about getting links for spammy sites. It generally should not hurt you. The links just aren't given as much link juice as a solid website would give you. If you could lower your rankings by having links from spammy sites it would actually be a great technique for killing your competition just by spamming their links all over spammy websites, and thus moving yourself up. But, it doesn't work that way. So no, it doesn't hurt your site.

Click to expand...

exactly .. do white hat clean and than mix some black hat techniques to make it grey hat

Even though you can avoid leaving footprints, I wouldn't do too many blackhat if I were working on a long term project.
One mistake can kill the entire website, and you would have to start over.

thanks for the insight everyone. I think that I'll use gray hat for affiliate projects, and white hat on more serious above the board projects, at least for now. Gray hat seems like a way to get better results faster. Life is too short to not take any chances. No balls no babies

Agree with everyone that blackhat works long term, just dont make ridiculous footprints and you will be fine.

Some good questions - google will penalize you from being associated with a "bad neighborhood" and BH is not a good method for long term sites unless, you only start with it gradually once your site has established enough authority to take some risks. If you start with a new site, you will probably face issues after a short lived success.