White Hat Versus Black Hat SEO Techniques
White hat techniques tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hat uses techniques that are banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing. Creating a nicely designed website with easy to follow navigation and relevant quality page content will produce far better results in the long run …
The biggest change over the years in how search engines see SEO efforts is their growing emphasis on content. Before, the quickest way to build SEO momentum was to take a piece of content and spam it with keywords and links that aren’t even relevant for the sole purpose of improving traffic flow and PageRank. However, today, search engines usually penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether
In a way, an ethical webmaster does not really need to worry about what is blackhat or whitehat. Since the beginning of internet time, search engines have had the same goal. That goal was to give web browsers the ability to find content they are looking for and ensure that said content links to other content that is related. Sites using unique content as both link bait and actual web site building are already pulling ahead of those still trying to use spammy techniques to get ahead. This trend will only get more pronounced as search engines improve their technology to weed out poor content.