Google is becoming more determined about making the more creative SEO ideas as blackhat and against Google’s guidelines. SEO book notes:

There is a great thread over on SEOmoz by Matthew Inman about how some Googlers consider any of his future attempted linkbaits and widgetbaits to be off topic spam, based on his aggressive misuse of widgets in the past.

With hundreds of comments many of them are noise, but some of them are spot on with Google’s current trends, especially those from Jeremy Luebke and Jim Boykin. Jeremy wrote:

Google is determined to make any scalable link building process blackhat. It won’t be long before all off topic linkbait, including articles, is considered linkspam.

I would have to say that it is a bit ironic to claim that anything with the term “bait” as in “using bait to catch the dumb fish to eat” (that would be the SEO-ignorant people) is really white hat. The concept of anything called ‘linkbait’ or ‘widgetbait’ automatically implies your working towards the search engines in mind.

At least, that’s how I think Google perceives it.