According to Flávio Raimundo, who will conduct the verification for the multinational beverage's company, an enormous amount of good will is required to conduct these inspections. "If we would follow Google's strict recommendations, a web site would not be much more than a white background HTML with .txt fonts." If you are willing to enter this third party audit trend, you have to be very careful not to confuse those errors made by mistake or inexperienced SEO's. So it´s not about classifying everything into Black or White Hat SEO.

"Black, white, gray -- those are really emotional concepts. My personal opinion is that an audit shouldn't classify techniques in any way besides: works, doesn't work, and will cause problems. As an independent auditor, my job isn't to classify. My job is to find out what's been done and then inform the client," writes Gabriella Sannino. However, if she comes across any techniques that don´t comply with her way of getting SEO done, she points them out to her clients along with a "why this is a problem" report.

About Black Hat's cost efficiency, Sannino says that there are many aspects to consider before being sure about the myriad of advantages embedded in techniques to fool the search engines. "In upfront costs, I have no idea. Black Hat is probably cheaper it seems that it would be. For example, if you use comment spamming -- you know, those comments that have nothing but spammy links in them -- as a technique to rank your client, as far as I'm concerned you're using Black Hat techniques. It's cheaper, because you don't have to put any time or thought into it."

SEMPO president, Boggs sees an adherence to Black Hat techniques for very competitive segments, such as the financial and pharmaceutical ones. According to Boggs, those segments are highly competitive and there is enough money in it to bet on Black Hat. About pricing, Boggs thinks there is not a difference between SEO implementations whether they're Black or White Hat.