What happens if a company only uses black hat techniques for an extended period of time?

[FrontlineMobility]

Let's say I were to start a company.  Of course, I want to be indexed, crawled, and pulled up in the search engines.  So I start using black hat seo techniques.  I comment spam, keyword stuff, spin articles, hide text, etc.  I publish hundreds of articles per day on well know sites with excellent page rank.  If I am doing all of these unethical techniques, what is going to happen to my website?

[mickey11]

Well I will go one by one

comment spam - probably nothing since if google took action then you can comment spam a competitor and take them down - so this reasoning would be counter productive

keyword stuff - you will get penalized if google catches you

spin articles - nothing especially if you do a good job

hide text - you will get penalized if google catches you

[linztm]

Well in the short term your website would increase in rank and increase your traffic.  As time goes on though - Google would eventually see the pattern as it does with mimes and decrease, not only your pagerank, but also your domain authority as a result of the link spamming from low quality sites.  The longer the page remains with low quality links and poor SEO practices, the more and more likely it is that it will be penalized or even black listed.

Does not recommend.

[IanTheScot]

There is also the possibility that the initial boost you get from your techniques will result in high visibility for your site which means you will get legitimate links from other domains that will build your rep so that if Google ever bothers to drop the value of your black hat links to nothing you still have plenty of authority from real links.

There is also the possibility, even though Google would of course deny it, that if you are also spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on Adwords that they will overlook any bad stuff you do and you will never suffer.

Just speaking from experience - watching another company.