The definition of black hat is “an action with malicious or criminal intent”. Well, let’s not exaggerate here. When it comes to Black Hat SEO, we’re basically talking about measures that go against the Google Guidelines.

Breaking Google Laws is not considered illegal, because Google is not the government and thus cannot tell you what you can or can’t do on your website.

However, if Google catches you, they might take your website from their result pages. My suggestion for you is to never ever use SEO black hat techniques. But as I remember another famous black hat once said: “if one is to understand the great mystery, one must study all its aspects”.

I have been using black hat techniques on different experimental sites for quite some time. None of these sites were actually of any importance, and none of them belong to clients. Call it a hobby or just curiosity.

All below black hat SEO techniques below  still work like a charm. And still, if you are considering using these methods, do it on a site that has no business value. It’s like gambling — you can lose everything, and there is no guarantee that Google will not find out about them one day and ban you from their result pages. Be careful.

Image Mirroring

If you have a stock image that everybody uses, it’s unlikely you’ll get any SEO credit for it as it’s not unique. Why would Google show your image, if it has been used by hundreds of other sources? I talked about this specific Google image algorithm on my blog post “How to use SEO Optimised Images” in the chapter “Selecting a Unique Image for Your Site”.

If you mirror a common stock image, Google won’t recognize it anymore. Google still hasn’t updated its algorithm to recognize such tweaks. If you mirror an image, it’s considered a new image.

But, is it a good idea? I would rather use this method instead: My article “How to use SEO Optimised Images” uses the same black hat SEO technique for images, but turned it into a white hat SEO technique that actually helps your images rank in Google image results.

The effect is the same with a little more effort. It’s worth looking into it.

Chances of Google Busting You

It’s not likely that Google will find out about this soon as not many people use this technique. It’s recommended to monitor how many people actually use this technique in the future. So far, I can see that many Asian-based websites use it including Russia and Ukraine. I can see this when I search for my mirrored image using the “Search Google for image” feature on the Chrome browser (click right mouse button on an image).

Once it becomes a common black hat technique among SEOs, this might be included in one of Google’s future updates. I don’t see this happening in the next 4-5 years, but when it happens, your rankings for those pages you have been using mirrored images for may lose their rankings.

Location Matters

If you have a marketing company located in Uzbekistan and one in San Francisco, it’s more likely in my opinion Google will rank your content higher for the company in San Francisco . I call it the Google patriotic algorithm. Google would never confirm this, and there is no proof — but it’s an educated opinion based on my observations. I saw great SEO websites with great SEO content ranking low because of their location.

How To Use This Black Hat SEO Technique

You might think, why not pretend like I am somewhere else by using all the location keywords on my website? Well, don’t forget about your IP, as Google knows where your website is located based on your host. My solution: start a company in the United States and use a U.S. host.

And while you’re at it, live here, enjoy life. Ah yes, the visa problem if you’re not from around here. I can’t help you with that — but wait: you’re a black hat SEO! You’ll find a way, I’m sure.

Inverted Index

I developed this method in the Technical University of Cologne in Germany during my PhD studies in information sciences — part of my research was about search engine data structures, and algorithmic patterns of search engines, and then it came to me — this could be the perfect black hat SEO technique for manipulating the search engine algorithm!

A little later I tried it on actual Search Engines, and it still works today.

This is how it works: You basically look for competitors which rank higher than you do for certain keywords on the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages). You then copy the whole text on that page and invert index it. That means you extract all the words out of that text with line breaks.

This is how an inverted index of this article could look like:

What you have now in the above image is called a “Modified Inverted Index“.

Now comes the hard part.

Create a unique text containing all these words. So, understand this: usually an SEO content writer gets around 4-5 keywords that need to be embedded into the text.

In this case, the SEO content writer gets around 300 keywords. That makes this a very hard effort and it’s very time consuming. But do it, publish it, and see what happens.

I bet you will outrank the competitor’s page. But the hardest part is to find an SEO writer willing to provide 300 keywords for an article. My advice: be ready to perform CPR on your SEO content writer when giving them keywords.

Chances of Google Busting You

This is a very specific and rare and scientific black hat SEO technique that deals with the core algorithms of Google, and it’s very unlikely in my experience that Google will ever find out about it. And even if it does, I highly doubt that it will be able to determine if you have been using this technique or not.

As the text you will create will be much different than the one you have “reverse inverted” or “hacked”, it’s almost impossible to trace back what really happened here.

Disclaimer: all information in this website has been provided without liability or any kind of proof – it is all based on my personal humble opinion.