I am purely White, but...

[YouON]

I spend a lot of time building great content for my webzines/blogs and I received quality links from other blog of my niches. So the game is done, I receive targeted and quality traffic from Google and my rankings in SERP are often good... but... there is always a "but"...

Sometimes I see some sites in #1 with competitive keyword in my niches who has built link from hundreds of trash-site. So I understand that Google has not reached his objective to fight spam definitely.

Now I decided to understand from scratch "Black Hat" strategies... brrrrrrr... 
In example i build my links manually, commenting on blog, talking on forums, submitting into directory and obviously spending a lot of time and energy for good guest-posting... as I say but... Anyone have experienced with automated software like Senuke and others? Not to become a spammer, but really to understand what is the best for us... I see also people buy links from Philippines company who has hundreds of employees who manually build links... Hope you may understand my point of view (and my poor english)...

All the best, Alessio

[SeattleOrganicSEO]

Do realize one thing Alessio.  Asking a question like that here in a website/SEO authority site where nobody wants to ruin their reputation, you'll probably never get someone to say:

_F*ck yah!  Go and do as much Black Hat as you can!  It' works!  _

You know, over the years, I've seen a lot of people jumping into the arena of SEO and asking questions similar to yours.  I did.  When I first got into the business, a guy who I considered someone who's VERY ethical and incredibly White Hat taught me a strategy that probably might be considered Gray or at least spammy in terms of today's standards.

Frankly, we found a bit of a jump due to blog commenting in our initial days and we rank quite high because of it, but some would argue that's spammy as well.  At the same time, writing comments on blogs that add to the conversation are supposedly a "contribution" vs. spam.  At the same time, I don't know if I would be or would have been commenting as much to blogs as I did in the past.

I had a conversation with a very highly respected SEO who speaks at some of the largest conferences in the world and also is one of the top people in a company SEOMoz absolutely loves, but we agreed that some of the "old strategies" work and are still applied.  Do we do them 100% of the time?  No.  But will we say we don't do them?  I'll let you figure that one out.

I recommend to clients all the time to do link building in the most white hat, natural ways possible, but guess what?  They rarely follow up on those strategies even if we give them everything it takes to apply them.  However, I would avoid doing things like cloaking and anything that is extremely black hat.  However, do note that you'll usually get answers from people saying stick with doing things as "white hat" as possible.  Who wants to take a beating here proclaiming the opposite?

[MarieHaynes]

Don't do it!  I can understand the frustration of seeing a competitor beat you by using black hat techniques, but joining him is not going to help and could end up really hurting you.

You mentioned that a lot of your backlinks come from blog comments and forums.  If you're spending a LOT of time going after these links it may not be the best spend of your time.

I've recently gotten into guest posting and I'm amazed at my results already.

[ChrisDyson]

Hi Alessio

One common Black hat tool that can be used in a White Hat way is Scrapebox

Scrapebox can be used to harvest valuable backlinks that you can manually work with e.g. search for Guest posts you can also do competitor research, bulk check your backlinks to make sure they are still live, perform bulk WhoIs lookups and lots more things too.

As you can imagine a tool that can automatically scrape blogs for guest blogging opportunities or who  might publish your new infographic is going to save you lots of time.

Hope this helps

[AlanMosley]

I'm with Istvan, dont do it

as with seeing sites do well with lots of spammy links, it is often the case that they also have a few really good links, and it is that few good links that is getting them their rankings. if they are being sucessfull with only spammy links, they have teh chance of getting found out at anty moment. Most sites like this dont last.

Stick with it, success is not garenteed, but usually good content with time will win.

[Keszi]

Hi Alessio,

Regarding gaining a lot of links (from agencies or from softwares) I am always getting back to the same idea:

Do you think the software or the link builder (which is payed 4$ for 100 links.... and no kidding I have heard even rougher payments in that industry) does respond on the following questions?

1. Does that link provide information, +value for the reader?
2. Is that link complementary to the content where it is placed?
3. Does the visitor, who reaches our site find what he was looking for through that link?
4. Is that link valuable for robots?

I believe that we, as online marketers we should focus for the idea of gaining more trust from both visitors(HUMANS) and Search engines(ROBOTS).

Now gaining a lot of low quality links will not harm Humans (at least not directly) but may harm robots reputation. I think you should ask yourself: Do I really want that?

I hope that helped,

Istvan