Getting in the top in search engines is very hard job. If you are targeting high competitive keywords it may take a long time to get into top 10. In this situation many webmasters have a dilemma -- continue with white hat SEO or try some dirty tricks? Lets have a look at advantages and disadvantages of both solutions.

There are one basic advantage and disadvantage of white hat SEO. You don't risk penalization but it needs quite a long time to succeed. On the other hand black hat SEO can speed up the process. But there are some very strong reasons why never use black hat tactics:

1. Black hat is not ethical. In other words it is pure cheating. If the ethics is not argument for you continue reading the other reasons.

2. If you use hidden text you will be probably reported by your competitors. It is not difficult to find the hidden text on the page. Just press CTRL + A and you will see everything including the hidden text. Every page can be also explored using "view page source" function.

3. Spamming the weblogs and forums doesn't work in the long run. It cannot be called regular link building method. Most of these links will be deleted in a few hours or days. Good forums have moderators who can delete spam very quickly. Weblog comments are usually moderated so the spam will never appear on the site. And most of the blogs which are not moderated have nofollow attribute. It means the links from such websites are ignored by search engines. The remaining links which can have some positive SEO impact will be deleted as soon as the site owner find them. If you get a lot of such links which will be deleted in a few days or weeks google will think you are buying links and it can hurt your SE ranking.

4. Automated link exchange schemes don't work. Google has very good algorithm and can reveal such schemes. If you participate in such scheme you will probably also get in troubles for another reason -- bad neighborhood. You have no control under the links which are displayed on your website. It may happen that a lot of links to low quality websites will appear on your web. This may cause the penalization.

5. Buying links is also penalized. Google doesn't like pagerank manipulation caused by link sales. If you buy links you can be reported by competitors.

As you can see black hat SEO may work for you but if you are running serious business you will probably want to succeed in the long run. People who are using black hat tactics usually don't have quality product or service and for this reason they don't care about possible penalization in the feature. They know there is no future for them so they try to sell as quickly as possible. For this reason customers tend go away from such marketers. It is up to you now if you are interested to run serious business or not.