I think Blcack Hat methods is interesting, but i am never use it. But more interesting is "secret hat". Is this new term? Yes i think
I never use black hat before. While analyzing competition for one of my keyword,i fond a competitor who rank in top result he/she has stuffed his keyword even in img alt tag. But i can't see his site after a couple of months.
Well according to a google webmaster I used "funny linking techniques". When I first started in SEO I was optimizing for a very competitive keyphrase and I structured my website basically like the page that was ranking in first spot, using some links in the text body that were pinting to the page the article was on. I got kicked by google, down-ranking my page around 500 positions for this... The guy on the first spot stayed on the first spot...
I just did one and when I came to know in the past that it was a black hat one, I reversed it. It was a redirect of an old page to a new site to give it quick results. I love SEO and want the results the right way too. What is the fun otherwise, I better pay for it to someone else. Though one of the amazing black hat techniques I saw one day was that you can redirect the traffic of a website only for the search engine bots and not effect the normal users at all. As in the site will open up normally for all users, but the bots will be redirected to another page giving it all the link juice. well I dont need to tell you how you can use this further to great use.