This week on Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about the "war"  that happens in the spam game.  He discusses how Google looks at link manipulation, how spammers combat this, and how webmasters should consider a link to be white or black hat.

UPDATE from Rand: Just wanted to clarify a couple points.

#1 - Linkbait & Badges & Viral Content are, by Nature, Whitehat

The reason is that you're not building the links. You're creating content and letting readers, bloggers, etc. link to it only if they want to - even if your intention is to get links, the intention of the people actually doing the linking (unless they're friends of yours who want you to do well in the SERPs - gotta have some savvy friends for that) is simply to share. That's as white hat as it gets - the links would exist, badges and banners and forum and blog posts - even if there were no search engines. Analytics, blog themes and tool links MAY also be whitehat, unless they're "sponsored" - in which case, you're not pointing to the source, you're pointing to someone who's basically trying to buy link juice.

#2 - The Goal of the Video is to Help Get a Perspective on How to Think About Links from the SE's Perspective

I'm not trying to condemn any particular method of link building. I personally don't think grey hat or even most black hat stuff is morally wrong or illegal, I just think it's not as effective in the long run. When you see a post like this, I'm just trying to share my opinion on how to think like an engineer - how to create links that really look natural and have the ability to continue passing value, even if they're manually reviewed by spam teams.

Finally - remember that I'm not talking about what the search engines can find and devalue, I'm talking about what they might want in a "perfect" world and how to consider whether your links (whether technically manipulative or not) can fit into that profile.