In the strictest interpretations of Google’s playbook, doing anything at all to try and influence other websites to link back to you is frowned upon. The link building aspect of SEO is strictly not against any valid international laws of any government in the world regarding the Internet, it is just something that Google doesn’t like as it affects their rice bowl – which is their advertising revenue stream. With that said, there is a spectrum of activities that can be generally considered white hat, grey hat and black hat in the SEO community. To put it simply, white hat link building is extremely slow, depends on luck, depends on your real world personal networking and connections with the big leagues or celebrities, or depends on extremely brilliant but one-hit-wonder public relations manoeuvres – let’s face it – the average decent small business website have very little chances of being in this category. On the other end of the spectrum, black hat link building is extremely tempting, it can get fast results, but they are often short-lived, or can be costly in the long run to maintain as you cover up your past shady tracks. It takes the manipulation of Google’s algorithms to the extreme. It can also sometimes be borderline illegal as some tactics may involve some form of hacking or defacing other websites to place a link to yours, or bringing down competitor sites through DDOS attacks. Where most good SEO’s play, including us, is in the Grey Hat range – where we take a little bit of black hat concepts, and build backlinks while maintaining a clean white hat image in the eyes of Google as much as possible. Grey Hat SEO’s work based on social contracts and mutually beneficial relationships and understanding between one another, by building backlinks off each other’s websites and offering benefits in exchange. For e.g. it is not illegal at all in any liberal capitalist country in the world for a website to sell space for a feature article and backlink inside it for a fee or other compensation, provided the content and activities related to it are legal. This is simply a Guest Post or Sponsored Editorial. Google may not like it, but both Google and that website and the one it links to, all work under a capitalist system, and it’s totally legal.