What's "acceptable" blackhat SEO?

Hey everyone, I'm kinda new to SEO and this forum so I don't know a whole lot about blackhat or whitehat seo. But I noticed one thread about someone sabotaging his competitor by giving him bad links and causing his ranking to fall. Lots of people got mad and told him it was a terrible thing to do. If that type of technique got such a negative response on the Blackhat SEO forum on a site called blackhatworld, I wonder what "blackhat" activities are totally cool and acceptable? Where do you draw the line?

Crossing the line: Nigerian Scams, Fake Japan Donation Sites, Cheating Google Adsense

Part of the reason there's such a negative response to things like direct attacks on your competitors, is because that competitor could very well be one of us.

Blackhat SEO is about ignoring or working around a lot of the rules and guidelines of the websites we're getting backlinks on and the guidelines of the search engines. It's kind of an us against them thing.

When you start attacking other marketers then it's no longer us against them, it becomes more like you against maybe one of us. If you want help learning how to do the work and get your site to outrank your competitor then you'll get a lot of support here. That's what the forum is about.

If instead of figuring out how to outrank another marketer by doing a better job, you decide to start destroying all the efforts that the other marketer has done then you're not going to get a lot of support. You're not actually doing anything to make your own site rank better you're just making the other marketers site rank less. Not just less than yours but less than all the other competitors sites as well.

And then you still have all those other competitors to contend with still too. They might not have been able to outrank the guy you just knocked down, but since you didn't actually get your site higher by doing a better job those other competitors may very well be able to outrank you fairly easily. That's why aside from the issue of attacking you're fellow blackhatters, it's usually better for you to do the work necessary to actually outrank you're competitors. You've much more likely to stay in the lead if you do it the right way.

I'm pretty sure I'm just reiterating what GreyWolf said, but I agree, so I wanted to add my two cents. It's stupid to attack one of your competitors, hoping to make his ranking fall. First of all, why waste that effort on them when you could be using it to directly help yourself? If all you're doing is attacking a competitor, even if their ranking falls (which will likely only be temporarily), there will be another competitor to come take their place, and if you're not working to make your site better, you'll just spend all your tiime trying to knock down the competition, and you'll never get anywhere.

Not to mention that once a competitor sees what you're doing, they'll likely do the same back to you, and it'll be a never-ending cycle. This isn't high school. If you want to beat a competitor, outrank them, don't try and sabotage them.

Thanks guys. I wasn't justifying sabotage or saying I support it, I was just not sure what "blackhat" is supposed to mean if not "evil." Now I understand that it's about breaking the rules of Google and the websites you're getting links from. It's us vs Google, not us vs each other. There's o bad karma when you manipulate Google.