Modern "Black Hat" SEO

I've noticed that a surprisingly large number of SEOs don't actually know what modern "black hat SEO" looks like.

Many still think it's simply poor SEO or that it means something like:

• Keyword stuffing
• Buying backlinks
• Hidden text

Most of those are relics from the early 2000s.

Modern search manipulation is dramatically different. Today, it's a multidisciplinary field that often combines SEO with software engineering, AI, automation and data science.

I rarely use the term "black hat SEO". I prefer broader terms such as modern search manipulation or adversarial search tactics. To me, SEO exists on a spectrum that ranges from strict, Google-gospel-driven vanilla SEO to highly technical and unconventional approaches. It's all part of the same ecosystem and I simply call it holistic SEO.

It's also worth pointing out that many techniques commonly labelled as "black hat SEO" are not merely against Google's guidelines.

Some are entirely legitimate, while others sit in ethical grey areas. And yes, some are outright illegal, including website hacking, account takeovers, identity theft and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

I'm not going to explain how any of these tactics are carried out. Besides being ethically questionable in many cases, some represent valuable commercial know-how, and I don't give that away for free. I work for money.

What I can do, however, is explain what these tactics are and the disciplines they draw upon.

Depending on the objective, practitioners may work with areas such as:

• Programmatic SEO
• Large-scale AI automation
• Parasite SEO
• Expired domain strategies
• Authority and entity engineering
• Search reputation management
• Competitive intelligence
• Information influence campaigns
• Digital PR at scale
• Programmatic internal linking
• Large-scale content operations
• SERP engineering
• Technical infrastructure optimisation
• Search data analysis and automation

The technical skill set required has evolved just as much.
It's no longer unusual to see expertise in:

• Python
• JavaScript
• APIs
• SQL
• Linux
• Docker
• Cloud platforms
• DNS and HTTP
• Web scraping
• Log analysis
• Data engineering
• Reverse engineering
• LLMs and AI agents
• Automation frameworks
• DevOps

Whether you agree with these techniques or not is beside the point. I don't care.

You can't effectively defend against something you don't understand.

SEO today is a much broader discipline than optimising title tags and hoping Google rewards you.

Search has changed. So have the people pushing its boundaries. 😉

I hope this helps.