Does black hat SEO work?

Personally I deal mainly in white hat SEO tactics but recently I was outranked by a site which was clearly black hat, I searched his links and a majority of them were spammy blog comments, the on page SEO was also pretty poor with a clear case of keyword stuffing.

However his tactics worked he was number one! Even though he stole my spot I didn’t report him, I wanted to see how long he stayed up there for. I thought he would be gone in a week of so but to my amazement he stayed number one for a good 3 months, he must of made some money!

I thought I would give this black hat world a try, so I started a new site (I won’t name it), I used black hat tactics to get it ranked including spammy blog comments, forum profiles, link exchange networks and Fivver.

I staggered each tactic per month, the first month I created well over 5,000 blog comments the following month 1,000′s forum profiles. By this point I was actually ranking ok on the 2nd page for a keyword that had medium competition.

The next month I had a go at some link exchange networks, these worked the best and I managed to get to first page.
Last but not least I tried fivver and brought thousands of blog comments + got myself onto some link wheels.

After all these spammy black hat methods which took me about 4 months to complete I was comfortably sitting in position 4 and making around $8 per day in Adsense revenue.
But to no surprise 46 days later I received a message on webmaster tools from Google saying they have detected un-natural links (or something like that) please fix the problem and submit a reconsideration request.

So the answer to the question ‘Does black hat SEO work’ is yes it does, but not for that long. Though I did make around $400 during the months the site was live so if you minus the fivver gigs brought, hosting and the domain I had made a profit of around $350. Which I do not think is too bad!!

I think that if you made a site say 4 months before Halloween and blasted it with links then you could rank for say ‘Halloween costumes’ and make even more, it doesn’t matter if you get slapped after you can just repeat it the following year on a different domain.

I do believe though that if I was a bit softer in my approach and didn’t just blast my site with links but instead staggered them and built just one or two high quality links then I wouldn’t have got slapped, I will test this and report back!
So to sum up if your just out to make a few bucks fairly easily then yes, black hat does indeed work.