Is this blackhat SEO?

I've found a couple of website putting 'related keywords' and lists of misspellings in their footers e.g.

'Related Keywords: insurance quote insurance south africa online insurance quotes cheap insurance premiums motor insurance' (these were anchor text links to other pages on the site)

and

'This section is to help search engines direct users that misspell or mistype words to pages that relate to information users where looking for.

Common misspellings variations: out surance , ousurance , out urance , outurance , out insurance , ousurance'

Is this OK according to Google's Guidlines?

I cant see anything specifically regarding against it. At least they are being transparent about what they are doing.

Footer text links have little value and they may very well rank for those misspellings just by having them there. I wonder if they get any traffic from it.

I believe it would be black hat if they were trying to hide the text, i.e. showing it as white text on a white background. But since they're not doing that, I can't see what would be black hat about it (unless those keywords AREN'T relevant to the web site).

It's not blackhat, but it is a bit spammy, and a manual reviewer could flag it as spam.. it's not a hardcore offence, but it really is only there as spider food however nicely they dress it up.

Right, and Google's guidlines explicitly state that you should create pages for users not search eninges.

However this is ambiguous because it is for users who mis spelled words.

I don't think its too risky for them to operate this but as Channel 5 said it does look a bit spammy.

Would I do it for a client? NO!

Would I worry about it if it were my own site? NO!

Thanks for the feedback!

I'm just a bit puzzled by these sites as they are quite spammy yet are doing really well in the serps. The most perplexing thing is that these webmasters are interlinking their own sites on an epic level yet aren't being penalized in any way. For example one of these sites gets most of its 66000 links from other sites on the same IP with the same domain registrant details.

Quite often spammy sites will do well becasue the blackhat/dodgy techniques can actually work in the short term. The site will eventually get flagged and drop from the rankings, they probably know this and will set up another spammy site, and another one, and another one.

I've been monitoring these sites over the past 3 months and they don't seem to be raising any flags with Google.

Have you done a whois to see how old the site is? What are the URLs of the sites?
They might get a fair bit of traffic from the misspellings esspecially if they have lots of them as there will be little or no competition for them

I have done misspellings on my site as wanted people to find my site for mispellings what my site is about. I see this as spammy.

I deal with computers and have many misspellings for the name and come top for most of them.

For example try "domputers" my site is computersinspain com

It's playing pretty close to the edge.

Now your ranking #3 for ousurance,

I think the website owner could avoid possible spam detection by throwing a limit on the number of misspellings per page...maybe a couple miss spellings on one page..a couple more on another page...

It wouldn't be too hard for them to catch these. It may be in their algorithm to tank sites with 5+ consecutive misspelt words on a page. If its not coded into the algorithm already, it may be eventually. Keep your onsite as well as offsite optimization appearing as natural as possible.

I don't think this technique is come under black hat and Google has never say don't use for misspelling keyword. For my point of view some time this techniques are help for get the traffics.
As per saet comments that "I've been monitoring these sites over the past 3 months and they don't seem to be raising any flags with Google" , it may because of SEO work was not on the right path.

For me white hat is not 'will I escape being punished' it is 'is the traffic because my content is most relevant'. As such it is grey hat, at best, to lie in wait for people who can't spell.

in a way you right but i don't think it's easy to compete hard KW when every body else do what you said and more...