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That's a good idea, to remind them that the naughty links could have their value wiped in one go at any time.

Thanks. If you want to outsource some work....

In this case I'm defining black hat as placing links on websites, that SEO company presumably own, which are covered by links to unfamiliar online stores using high value keywords.

We're not using Adwords but are using Google Analytics.

I've wondered that a lot myself. Is it possible to test it?

Very true. I can see that that our search traffic has a close correlation with the number of conversions. The search traffic they are getting is for high value keywords in their niche, but they aren't getting much traffic from search really. So in this case, higher ranks equal more revenue.

I’ve been link building for a small online store. Before I took over their SEO, they hired a company who got them lots of spammy links over a 12 month contract. The spammy links didn't seem to improve or hurt rankings on their main keywords but general search traffic has almost doubled.

Now I’m doing whitehat SEO for them and getting links through emailing bloggers and giving them reasons to link to us. Over 2 months (amongst over things) I’ve obtained links from around 35 websites, mostly PR 3 – 4 with a few up to PR 7.

On my own website, a couple of links like this would produce a noticeable effect in the rankings, but I can’t seem to budge the ranks for this website.

I’m concerned that they might just want to go back to their old SEO firm for more spam links.

Am I doing the right thing? Am I getting links quick enough and how can I argue the case for whitehat if they’re getting more noticeable results from blackhat?