I would say that ANY on/off page optimization which is done with the end intention being the gaming of a search engine for ranking purposes is “black hat” SEO. That being said, who among us (internet marketers/SEO’s) doesn’t incorporate some form(s) of search engine manipulation techniques on a regular basis? I think the only question is; how far will we go to get the top spot and our risk tolerance level.

My sense is that outside of the really high-volume consumer markets (there are many significant B2B product categories where traffic is measured in thousands of pages/month), building websites to appeal to robots rather than users seems to still be growing.

The marketing gurus will say, “well, you shouldn’t compromise the user experience” but the subtext is that they’ve omitted the word “severely.” I see plenty of sites that exhibit “good SEO” and clearly prize that over the experience they deliver to the marginal user. Obviously the strategy is to make this up on low-cost volume brought by the engines. That’s a hat, but it’s more white and cone-shaped.