White Hat SEO and Risk Free SERP Ranks

Does white hat SEO offers great risk free SERP rankings?
The common understanding is that black hat SEO is risky and white hat SEO or Ethical SEO is safe. But is there any clear definition to distinguish between white hat and black hat SEO techniques?
The general assumption is that any link building process or any promotion which happens naturally comes under white hat search engine optimization process.
Does that mean that promoting your own site by adding comments on other websites articles or blog posts comes under black hat SEO? The answer is YES. Pure white hat SEO back links is created by happy customers or readers of your website or blog. It is not uncommon to see that even SEO experts who strongly oppose black hat techniques openly promote non-natural link building. According to Google’s TOS, natural links are links others point back to your site without the need to pay for it, ask for it, comment for it or insert a link in your article to gain it.
This clearly indicates any unnatural link building is black hat SEO. Links is supposed to be built by your adoring fans or readers not by the website owner.
But in reality a website that offers a better quality product should get thousands of links to beat a competitor’s site that could well be offering a low quality product but in top SERP position.
Everyone is going mad to get .edu links to boost their rankings. To a great extend the .edu backlinks definitely help you to achieve good rankings. Even sites that have done black hat SEO to get .edu backlinks are performing well in search results with greater SERP.
Cloaking is a serious black hat SEO technique where different contents are served for search engines and human users. There are thousands of examples where sites busted for cloaking and banned from the index permanently. But experts say there are many websites who are successful in implementing clocking without being caught by search engine bots.
In essence White Hat SEO refers to the usage of SEO strategies, techniques and tactics which focus on a human audience rather than search engine bots. Here the SEO expert completely follows search engine rules and policies.
If you apply black hat SEO techniques for your clients and if they are not aware that you are doing black hat SEO then there is a serious problem. Ethics come into play as to whether you use a technique that you know can cause long-term complications for your client. This is pure non ethical SEO or black hat SEO.

But in real life scenario, white hat SEO strategies doesn’t yield expected results compared to black hat SEO. It is always true that your business model requires good rankings to achieve revenues, while search engines like Google doesn’t bother about your business or revenue. Even if you practice extreme ethical SEO there is no guarantee that Google will ensure that you enjoy ranking consistency after an algorithm update. If the competition is between equals, then each of the white/black hat techniques can have expected outcomes. But as long as there is stiff competition between large numbers of players in the market nothing is guaranteed. Search engines like Google continues their hunt for great content to expand their database to create more attractive search results.
The conclusion is that white hat SEO offers you a risk free SERP but may not be always yield you a top ranking. This is because the competition is always tough and the strategies adopted by your competitors and the search engine algorithm changes every now and then. Having said that it is always good to have a slow but steady organic SEO rather than fast and risky black hat practices.