Think of the old Spy vs Spy cartoons from Mad Magazine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_vs._Spy
I'll make the answer as un-techie as possible.
Basically Black Hat is bad and White Hat is good.
Google are concerned with providing relevant results to people using their search engine, and they've devised a range of tests to judge the relevance of sites.
Black Hat activities try to present the site in such a way that Google ranks it higher than it deserves to be. White Hat activities aim to make the site and it's links better and more relevant, so the site can be ranked higher.
It's a matter of time vs cost. White Hat takes forever, you need to put up relevant content and link it properly to other relevant content. It usually also means putting stuff online that's so good that other people choose to link to it.
Black Hat is faster, and usually entails spending a small fortune paying people to spam blogs and sites and build fake interest and fake backlinks to fool Google into thinking the site's popular and relevant.
White Hat is permanent - quality endures.
Black Hat means you need to start over every time Google change the rules.
Hope this helps.
Black Hat SEO is normally defined as the methods or techniques that are being used in order to rank higher on different search engines using prohibited tactics and ways. This is considered as unethical SEO.
Black hat SEO is the process of promoting a website in the search engine results by means of unlawfull methods
That name may have been invented by the search engines to describe any optimization activities that violate the search engine guidelines. In most cases they are just breaking Google law and can't be penalized beyond their site getting removed from the search index. Some operators do blur the lines an commit punishable internet crimes,
very confusing factor seek with yahoo or google it may help
Black Hat?????????
