Microsoft’s Senior Product Manager of Office Live Small Business wrote a blog post about some of types of link building you can engage in for the purpose of generating additional back links to your site. He starts his post with:

If you want lots of visitors to your Web site, it helps to have lots of links to your Web site. Link exchanges — sometimes called reciprocal linking or link swaps — are a popular way to generate more links.

Digging the hole deeper by listing a few sites such as LinksMaster.com (an automated link-exchange program) and LinkStrategy.com (paid links site) without actually checking with the Search team on what Microsoft’s guidelines are:

..Techniques that might prevent your website from appearing in Live Search results
The following techniques aren’t appropriate uses of the Live Search index. Use of these techniques might affect how your website is ranked within Live Search, and might cause your website to be removed from the index….. - Using techniques, such as link farms, to artificially increase the number of links to your webpage.

Now, I titled this post that he was indirectly (and obviously unintentionally) supporting blackhat SEO tactics since he did not specifically endorse the tactics but only talked about the ways you could garner more links. The problem is that his first post did not specifically note the downsides of the tactics, nor read Microsoft’s own guidelines.

His second post is trying to walk back from those statements by noting that it is the abuse of the techniques that are not allowed, noting that it could cause problems with search engines. The hilarity of all this is that Microsoft itself says that even using the techniques he talked about are not appropriate. That and plainly any kind of automated software to acquire back links is quite blackhat SEO tactic and is not within an inch of whitehat SEO.