Modern Day Black Hat SEO

Black Hat Is Harder & Easier Than Ever

By Charles Floate
As SEO has gone on, the industry has grown & grown & grown. This year, the industry as a whole has
hit over the $65 billion mark of industry worth.

With this increasing value, black hat SEO specifically has gotten both way easier & way harder than
ever before.

It’s Harder Than Ever Before Because…

• It requires a level of OnPage Proficiency – You NEED to be able to optimize your OnPage as
links simply don’t push the needle like they used to. It’s not the best link profile wins
anymore, and with the addition of the knowledge graph being introduced to almost every
SERP imaginable, you’ll need to be proficient in OnPage SEO to compete in almost every
industry on earth.
• Required tracking & data analysis – 3 years ago it really didn’t matter if you just built links at
randomly chosen anchors and URLs. However now-a-days, I track (literally) EVERY link and
anchor I build across all of my and my client sites. We also analyse both our link profiles and
OnPage every 3 months for our affiliate and client sites.
• You HAVE to be technically literate to compete – I knew SEOs ranking for multi-million-dollar
keywords that barely knew what a meta title was 7 years ago… I’m not even joking, links
mattered that much. Now-a-days, with the additions of the knowledge graph and an ever-
evolving web... You NEED to have at the very least, basic technical abilities to compete.
• Updates are getting stronger – It’s true, but they aren’t nearly as strong as Barry Schwartz
and the Moz fanclub would have you believe. For algo’s to learn on their own and evolve,
they need to be using artificial intelligence and without quantum computing (which is at the
very least, commercially unavailable for the next ~20 years) they simply can’t use it. That
means, that the algo’s are only updated when a human engineer physically updates it. That
being said, algo’s are getting stronger and they are requiring a higher level of knowledge and
skill to beat and manipulate, but… It’s still very possible to this day to do so.

It’s Easier Than Ever Before Because…

• You have access to more people, more data, more opportunities and more tools than you
have ever had before. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be making a pretty penny in SEO,
because you have more access than you have ever had before.
• The algorithm is setup so tightly (due to the human engineering) that it is literally wound to
specific “signals” – These signals (if manipulated properly) will rank your site insanely
quickly, and with minimal investment. As we’ll get into in the later case studies.