Why SEO Disgusts Me
webpronews.com
webpronews.com
And then the other part where you buy links and other crap.
SEO has started to become asociated with evil. It can be, and it is often easier to do it the evil way. But to some extent it can be done in a good way. You can give customers an awesome experience so they blog about it. Give away free stuff and so on. Its not only evil.
Even so, breaking it into white and black hat ignores the likely larger problem of ignorant SEOs - those who think they know what they're doing but are completely worthless. In my experience, most SEOs who take "black hat" tactics tell their clients. It's the ignorant SEOs that waste the time and money of legitimate businesses and earn a bad reputation for the industry.