From Search Engine Watch’s Black Hats Going White?, I hurdled the registration process at mediapost to read A Whiter Shade of Black (no it’s not a Michael Jackson biography):

Greg Jarboe: Black hat stuff is getting too hard. I’m actually thinking about turning legit.

Certain things are harder, many things are much easier. If you’ve kept up and have been innovating, you should be doing better this year than last (unless you were just KILLING it in the past, and have been brought back into the upper stratosphere). I’ve noticed that many techniques that once worked great by bluntly applying en masse now require more finesse. It’s the evolution of the game.

What would cause a confirmed black hatter to turn his back on the incredibly lucrative dark side of SEO and step into the light? As much as the army of engineers at Google and Yahoo would like to say it’s their constant refinement of their algorithms, I think there’s another force at work here. Online is just growing up.

I don’t think that’s it at all. I can’t speak for everyone, but many of the strong black hats that I know are using their black hat loot to finance a diverse portfolio of Internet ventures. The reason we are “stepping into the light” is to cover all the bases: to diversify. People get wrapped up in ethics when the real question for web entrepreneurs is: what works best?

SEO Black Hats don’t stop using a certain technique because we become overwhelmed with guilt from all the money we’re making. We don’t stop because we’ve outgrown an adolescent immaturity that some apparently think drives SEO Black Hats. We stop using combinations of techniques when they loose their utility or we develop new techniques that work better.

Danny Sullivan’s better analysis showed that he has a finger on the pulse of the SEO community:

More white hats seem to feel things they might have deemed wrong in the past to be more acceptable, while some black hats are deciding some aggressive tactics might not be worth continuing with. Meanwhile, “bad” techniques like cloaking suddenly don’t seem so black hat when Google itself fully cooperates with some sites to allow it. The world of SEO just getting more gray, to me.

If Danny Sullivan’s world is getting more grey, it means that some of the staunch SEO White Hats finally understand that obeying what Google (or Yahoo or MSN) says is not as sound of a business policy as paying attention to whay they do.