Where have all the black hat SEOs gone?

November 16, 2015: Black Hat SEO has long occupied the soft, mossy underbelly of the search ecosystem. While it’s usually a mistake to entrust the search visibility of your digital project to one of these people, the Black Hat SEO community constitutes a colorful — if somewhat baleful group of optimization professionals who spend their days and nights probing, reverse-engineering, and fixating on the latest algorithmic permutations of Google and Bing. For this reason alone they should be respected.

Unfortunately, the population of Black Hats active “in the wild” appears to be decreasing markedly. We report this conclusion after attempting to access their sites (which, by the way, all have excellent ranking, at least for the search term “Black Hat SEO.”

Where have all the Black Hat SEOs gone? We don’t know, but here are some of the sites which are currently Missing in Action:

SEOBlackHat.com (http://seoblackhat.com/)
The last update to SEOBlackHat.com occurred in early 2011. Conspiracy theorists may argue that the cessation of updates to this site happened within a month of the deployment of Google’s Panda algorithm. Even the forum posts have been “labeled” private, making them inaccessible to the general public. The Twitter feed of Quadzilla, the firm’s shadowy proprietor, is similarly dark. We really hope that nothing bad happened to him.

SlightlyShadySEO.com (http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/)
This site, whose motto is or was “Blackhat is Back,Baby,” appears not to be back. In fact, its last update was in February 2009, back when spamming Google was fairly easy. This is depressing, because in its day, SlightyShadySEO offered an eclectic, wonderfully shady stream of posts that even referenced Albert Mazlow: a figure who’s too often ignored in SEO circles. The site’s unnamed proprietor even attempted to find humor in site footer links. ROFL!

Seocracy.com (http://www.seocracy.com)
This witty repository of unauthorized insight launched in launched in 2007. It’s motto, “All Your Database Are Belong to Us” will be instantly recognized as referring to the first great Internet Meme. The unknown founder of this site was uniquely generous: he offered log scrapers, Bible downloads, and other spam-ready databases to his fans. Unfortunately, nothing remains of this site today, although copies can be viewed at The Internet Archive.

Syndk8.com https://www.syndk8.com/weblog/
Syndk8.com (“The Original Black Hat SEO Community”) also appears to have fallen on hard times. “In the past,” writes its owner, “I have written on the now dead Earl of Grey blog and the Syndk8.co.uk blog (redirect now) which Irishwonder still actively writes on under a subdomain, as well as the EarlGrey.mobi blog and probably some more I have forgotten about. possibly even wrote on syndk8.net which is just a redirect as well now. all deleted now.” (Don’t you love the way Black Hat SEOs talk — it’s right out of Peaky Blinders!) In all fairness, I wouldn’t rule this bloke out — he’s definitely a survivor.

Fantomaster (http://fantomaster.com/)
Fantomaster was a genuine Black Hat pioneer, launching in 2000 (Did Google even exist then?) with a smorgasbord of riches for the organic optimization community, including “cloaking tech, spider IPs, FAQs, resources and links to boost your web presence. The site soldiered on gloriously until Spring of this year, offering aspiring corporate spammers — I’m sorry, I mean organic optimizers — an “Unfair Advantage” through the skillful leveraging of “Cloaking, IP Delivery, SEO & SEM Services,” plus a popular 40-page downloadable report (“Cloaking: Essential Tool for Big Business.”) Unfortunately, Fantomaster is gone, dark and deep, into the abysmal cloak of history. Let’s hope that Corporate America can limp on without him.

Diary of a BlackHat SEO (http://blackhatseodiary.org/)
Here’s another one that went belly up in 2009 — years before people started saying that “SEO is dead.” Unfortunately, it’s not really a diary, which is deeply disappointing, because who wouldn’t want to read the daily musings and anxiety-laced thoughts of an unshaven, sweating man — on the run from Matt Cutts and the Google posse? For now, quality SEO fantasy literature fans will have to content themselves with Diary of a Professional Botmaster. Here’s a sample of what you can expect: “Last year when we had that worm go around the office and the Ops guys spent a couple of weeks chasing it down and cleaning up systems – that was pretty cool, and I can see how the authors of that worm could make quite a bit of money from it with a little banking knowledge. ”

Will somebody please pitch this guy to HBO?

Author
Recent Posts

Didit Editorial

Didit Editorial at Didit

Didit Editorial is the team publishing content to the Didit Marketing Blog.