There is a pretty large new thread at Black Hat World where "black hats" are discussing if their methods are dying out now. Black hat SEO is the SEO practice of going against Google's webmaster guidelines in order to manipulate the Google search results in their own favor. These practices can include link spam, hacking into sites, hurting competitors, and many other forms of spam listed in the webmaster guidelines.
The thread was started a couple days ago and now has dozens and dozens of replies. Some believe it is way harder to do black hat SEO these days then it was years ago. Some are saying Google's algorithms are way smarter now. Some are saying that Google acts too fast to remove their sites and the effort is not worth it. While others are saying it still works well and although it may be harder, it is still very effective if you know what you are doing.
Here are some quotes from the thread:
If it is an algorithm, it can be gamed. That should sum it up.
It's just evolving.
Blackhat works. Yes, still it is working well. The question is, how experience you do have and how well you could implement them.
It all depends on what niche you are working on and how much you got power to dominate. It's a game
Do you do black hat SEO? Do you know people that do? Please take our anonymous poll below and have your friends take it. I'd love to share the results in the near future.
Forum discussion at Black Hat World.
