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I watched a competitor get absolutely annihilated by Penguin. I've found that black hat SEO will always have a bad ending. It may take them a few months, but aggressive Black Hat always gets found. And I have never heard of White Hat SEO not working. I can only say perhaps you need some help understanding what some White Hat tactics are, especially regarding technical SEO. (Are you talking Technical SEO, External SEO or Front End SEO?) Each has different tactics for success.

I went into Crawl Diagnostics and chose Issues 4xx and got a few pages. Does that not work?

Your comment " All these big brands know black hat SEO and know they can get away with it so they do it." seems to broadly attack branded SEO work. Not all brands know black hat SEO. In fact, I've found more brands doing black hat and not knowing it was black hat. SEO is a mystery to brands.

Brands want results so it is on the part of the SEO or agency to educate on risks etc. I'm guessing most folks don't educate their bosses.

It's not all the big brands. There are ethical SEOs working at brands.

You shouldn't be using a redirect at all for a mobile site. You simply tag the mobile site with rel=canonical and then rel alt the desktop site.

302 redirecting is the biggest mistake ever. Run away from this vendor as fast as you can.

I agree. There is no reason to help a Google property rank. They'll do just fine doing that on their own. Also, they would be more alerted to "link building" actions to their own properties which could get your site a sterner look. I say, build your own site up.

I agree. There is no reason to help a Google property rank. They'll do just fine doing that on their own. Also, they would be more alerted to "link building" actions to their own properties which could get your site a sterner look. I say, build your own site up.

I went into Crawl Diagnostics and chose Issues 4xx and got a few pages. Does that not work?