A good read.
I don’t actively promote poker because it is too competitive, and I think it would take too long to put in all the work it would need to get decent rankings from scratch, white-hat that is.
I think established websites are in a completely different ball game than those which are less than 18 months old, but with so much competition any new white hat site runs the risk of being buried among the mountain of spam surrounding it. Having said that I am not condoning going black hat, but it’s a case of whether you are prepared to wait 18-24 minimum for a decent return in a highly competitive market.