Is using Mechanical Turk to increase our number of Google +1's Black Hat?

[Benj25]

Or will it affect our ranking positively or negatively at all?

[giantpeach]

If black hat is defined as using techniques to fool the search engines, then yes. If not, it's at least grey.

[giantpeach]

Better to produce great content on the site so that people +1 you naturally.... If the site isn't up to scratch then you won't get many conversions anyway.

[AnthonyYoung]

Um, short answer... yes. A darker shade of gray.

[CPLDistribution]

Black hat in my book....be interested to hear how you get on if you do try this strategy though.

[KeriMorgret]

And it's not allowed by Mechanical Turk, either.

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=policies

<a name="#violation_examples">What are some specific examples of HITs that violate Amazon Mechanical Turk policies? [excerpted]</a>

• HITs that directly or indirectly promote a site, service, or opinion
• HITs that violate the terms and conditions of an activity or website (for instance asking Workers to vote for something)
• HITs that generate "referred" site visits or click-through traffic
• HITs that ask Workers to take action to manipulate a website's behavior or results