Is creating satelite blogs and posting SEO-friendly posts considered black-hat SEO technique?

To be honest I think that this technique is just marketing...

Yes, but mostly in spirit rather than letter. The idea behind inbound links is that other credible sites are pointing to you as a form of recommendation. When you create other sites just for the purpose of recommending yourself, then you're violating the inbound link policies. Yes, people do it all the time and many don't get caught, but some do because they do it too much or somebody rats them out. It's just not worth the trouble. Just focus on creating great content and asking other sites for the links.

After the Google Panda update, many people saw a drop in traffic in sites that ranked for too many keywords. That means, if you have a site that targets too many and often irrelevant keywords, then you might see drop in traffic. To fight with this problem, Hubspot has assigned Subdomains for each user. Because, Google treats subdomains as separate sites. That's why all the Blogspot and WordPress subdomain blogs get the Google Love. But, the point is, you need to have narrow focus on each blog. Don't just go on and build blogs with the same topic. This also increases you effort for marketing and spend. Moreover, it is helpful to outsource specfic topics which will not overlap on each other and have specific focus. If you are doing that, then it is not Blackhat. Moreover, think about the usability of the site. If you are not posting crappy materials over and over again and giving your audience some valuable information and resources, then that is not Blackhat. Updated my answer here: http://internetmarketingqna.tumblr.com/post/11862942925/satellite-blogs-and-link-wheel-are-they-black-hat (with the topic on Proper Use of Link Wheel)

I think it is OK if you create a couple of satellite blogs on free platforms and use them to promote your main website. A good way to go for this is to use some kind of auto-publish platfrom (like http://ping.fm) or a plugin for your CMS. This will allow you to produce fresh content for all your satellite blogs and still drive all this traffic to your main website. Another great way to create a satellite blogs is by using well written and unique content. However, this is too much effort for boosting your website;s popularity and traffic, so I personally wont recommend it, especially if your budget is tight. Both ways are not considered Black Hat and many people use them successfully. To learn what is black hat, check http://www.seopalbg.com/blog/the-nature-of-black-hat-seo/

If you create good content on multiple platforms it should be for a purpose other it could be looked upon by Google as blackhat. There are programs that I won't mention that allow you to just blast tons of articles, and posts to dozens of blogs all at the same time or based upon a schedule but you have to do a lot of tweaking in order for these actions to be beneficial to you. I would create accounts on all the major sites, you can even create accounts on multiple blog platforms, because they can compliment each other and they each have different features in some cases. For example: Create one Squidoo lens Create one blogger blog Create a YouTube channel Create a Facebook Fan Page Create a Tumblr blog You get the picture so on and so forth, there is nothing wrong with this. But if you want to get mad crazy and create 100's of blogger blogs and squidoo lens, etc then it can get out of hand and think about it how are you going to effectively manage all of that and still manage your own primary website. Build the best content you can on your own website and on your primary web properties, if you create very good valuable content this will trump however many satellite blogs you create. It won't matter what new algorithm updates Google makes now or in the future you can be safe in knowing that if a human reviewer looks at your site they aren't going to pass it off and useless spam.

This isn't Black Hat. In essence, you are doing nothing more than publishing your work to relevant websites, and I don't know any SEO professional who doesn't build links in such a fashion. The only difference is that you're posting to your own sites, rather than ones that are available to all. You're creating a lot of work for yourself and might not see too much benefit to begin with, however in the long run this could pay off as a decent strategy (assuming the individual blogs become well respected in their own right). - Adam