White hat or black hat?

[roadhaulageservices]

There seems to be very differing opinions on what is good practice (white hat) and what is not (Black hat) and I'm not sure which way to lean (although my inclinations are slightly to the white). I'm starting a business offering a service and see ranking position 1-3 in the serps as my key to success. I'm creating good and useful content on my site and without much effort beyond on page seo have reached page 4 google for a few choice keywords. I feel that with a small number of links to a few of my pages i can reach page 1 and here is where my dilemma begins.

With a bit of investment in some software (£400-600 for 3 different products) I can start Tiered linkbuilding (in a black hat way) and get results quickly but potentially risking my site in the eyes of google.

I've been doing a little outreach to gain links in a whiter way but not had much success yet.

I'm keen to keep with the whiter side but see progress as slower.

Am I wrong? Can i build a robust link profile in a white hat way rapidly? Are there any quick wins i can gain to give me confidence? Why is white hat better than black hat?

All wisdom, experience, guidance and humour gratefully received.

[roadhaulageservices]

Thanks both. Very useful and much appreciated.

[ChrisAshton]

This is quite the ants nest of a topic and you'll probably get some very strong opinions either way.

A simple overview of my take on it is this:

If you want fast rankings and you don't care how long they stick, go black hat. If you want long term rankings, take the time and invest the effort doing it with White Hat SEO.

While I'm not a black hat advocate by any means, to say that black hat doesn't work would be ignorant and it certainly does have its place. As an example, if you were selling a fad product (maybe yo-yos become super popular again for a few months!) then that's a perfect opportunity for black hat. The fad will likely only last for a few month so spending 6-12 months building a strong site would be misguided. The risks of black hat are also fine because you don't really care if you get penalised a few months down the track once sales have died off again. Granted, there is always a risk you'll be hit almost immediately but one very strong positive of black hat SEO is you can just go spin up a new domain and try again in a matter of hours.

On the other hand, if you're trying to build a sustainable business and rankings are expected to bring you business for the foreseeable future then, in my opinion, taking the black hat gamble is silly.

Our website is the perfect example of this. When we started the company the first page of results for our most competitive term were filled with sites using black hat SEO. Over the years they've all suffered the wrath of Penguin to some degree and sit on page 2+.

Rather than trying to copy their efforts, we went with the white hat approach and have been sitting in #1 for a couple of years now and don't expect that to change so long as we keep our site and link profile maintained.