The main question is: At what point after crossing the rubicon into Grayhat SEO can you justifiably (or morally) limit yourself to various grayhat techniques and not go full swing into Blackhat SEO? Follow the background into how I came upon this before I go into the darker areas of SEO.

Background

I ran into one of my friend’s church friend the other day (or rather he recognized me) and we chatted for a little bit. I asked him what he was doing standing there by himself and he mentioned he was doing a survey. He invited me to try out what he was doing at the mall via asking questions and picking which pictures best represented the question (kind of a psychological test).

At the end of the questions, I asked what my results were and he said there were none, it was just to generate a conversation. I was disappointed as I have done surveys before and unconsciously called him out on his tactics by noting that he did not have a piece of paper or survey papers or anything to truly conduct a survey. Basically I implicitly called “BS” on his survey line and that his real goal was trying to convert people to his religion or to his church.

 The SEO Rubicon

As such, this got me into thinking about the similarity within SEO: At what point after crossing the rubicon into Grayhat SEO can you justifiably (or morally) limit yourself to various grayhat techniques and not go full swing into Blackhat SEO?

Google lays down its laws on where that line crosses: paid links (what kind you ask? Go bother Matt Cutts on that answer), cloaking, spam, etc.

Going Grayhat to…

Still, if your client is purely about making money and getting that ROI and you’ve already crossed into some kind of Grayhat SEO, where can you justifiably draw the line? Paid links? Cloaking? Spam? Based on what? How fast Google can catch you? How much you can make for that buck? How much it damages your reputation? Whether Google manually or algorithmically catches you?

I’ve been doing SEO long enough (and that’s saying something) to notice how manual Google’s search results really are within the niche areas when I have seen spammy 302s, javascript redirects, hidden text, hidden links, cloaking, etc all work to boost other sites. These sites even continue to rank even after I have placed spam reports into Google’s Webmaster Tools, not exactly a good way to help support the Whitehat SEO community in trying to stay whitehat.

Let’s Compare

Let’s put this in another way outside of SEO: If you’ve already come out and lied to someone (breaking the Ninth Commandment) in order to convert them, we can plainly say you’ve crossed some sort of gray line. Yet, if you truly believe that you must do what you can to save them from eternal damnation, at what point do you justifiably or morally hold back? Telling them you’re taking them to a beer party but turns out to be a Bible study and you are their only ride home?

Or, on the extreme end, using waterboarding as a way to convert them as it technically does not break the Sixth Commandment (yes, I know that this President who considers himself a Christian does not believe it is torture, that’s another issue), and a bit of temporary pain will at least save them in the long-run of eternal damnation (think: the ends justify the means).

Where Do You Stand?

I am in no way trying to demean him or any others on the minor gray issues (obviously the use of torture is just plain evil), but rather just want to bring up a comparative point for those not exactly knowledgeable with SEO. The real question is and would love to have answered: What prevents you from going fully blackhat and why?