[answerly]

>>a widely-used 'white hat' SEO practice.

Did you mean 'black hat'?

[dmc]

No, black hat would be more comment backlink blasts and such, using tools like scrapebox.

I think it's called "white hat" more so than "black hat" because it's usually "safe" to do so. i.e., Google will not be able to automatically detect these links which are against their terms of service to penalize them.

[TMK]

black hat would be hacking websites and adding those links to he hacked websites. :)

[cheae]

It doesn't matter what we call that but Google sees that as a black hat technique

[petervandijck]

No, paying for text links that are not labeled as ads is black hat alright.