Hi guys,
I don't disagree that the black hats are undermining the usefulness of the web and making things worse for everyone.
What I am not sure of is that they are not winning the battle... They're like cockroaches. You kill (blacklist) one and a zillion others crop up.
As the search engines adjust their algorithms to take the latest "tricks" into account, new "tricks" become doable. It's almost like the efforts to stop email spam. Have any really been successful?
I run a travel site which does some really nice things, like comparing the rates (with their permission) of a couple of the top search engines, amagamating their content,linking it to new pictorial content and user reviews, and allowing search from the Google mapping api, etc.
Yet although my pages have been extensively spidered by Google and Yahoo, the relative SERP's are still compartively poor.
In comparison, I reviewed one guys site - who's only claim to fame is that he joined a link farm. Has be been penalized? By a position of 22,300 in Alexa and a steady flow of traffic. He's maintained that for 4 months now. I don't believe in pointing fingers - so I won't reveal the guy's url - but I KNOW that's all he's done. The site is really poor from a user perspective, just an endless series of drill down country links, ending at a pitiable link to an existing affiliate travel program. I can not imagine he makes a lot of money off selling travel, but he told me he does well on the adsense click throughs.
So maybe he will eventually be blacklisted? Two days later he'll have reregistered on another isp under another name, with all the same links.
In the meantime, seeing that he makes a cosy $700-1500 a month from this site, he'll probably have launched a dozen others, maybe in a different field altogether.
Eventually, I think all of this will force a resurgence of the "human-controlled" directories, which are far more difficult to fool.
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