SEO’s Split: Black Hat Boom, White Hat Woes

• White hat SEOs feel stuck and discouraged, while black hat and super-technical SEOs are having a strangely good time right now.
• Google is easier to game than it has been in years, and LLMs might be even easier, which pushes more people toward grey and black hat tactics.
• If you are building a site in 2026, you probably should not lead with SEO; you should lead with brand, content, and social, then bolt SEO on top.
• Forums, review sites, and social platforms are the easiest vectors to abuse today, but they also have the highest long term risk if you lean on them too hard.

If you strip away the drama, the TLDR is this: white hat editorial SEOs are burned out, black hat and hardcore technical SEOs are treating 2026 like it is 2006 again, and Google plus the LLMs are both far more fragile than they look from the outside. If you want to grow with SEO right now, you probably need to step outside the old “publish more blog posts” playbook, think in systems, and decide how much risk you are actually willing to own instead of pretending the rules still work the way they did before the Helpful Content Update and AI overviews.

Why the mood in SEO feels split in half right now

The contrast between “white hat” and “black hat” circles is not subtle anymore, it is almost whiplash. You walk into a mainstream SEO or content conference and it feels quiet, anxious, almost like everyone is waiting for the next algorithm wave to smack their sites again. Then you hop into a private black hat group or a tight technical mastermind and people are trading wins, laughing about how simple some of the current exploits are, and talking more about scaling than survival.

Neither side is completely right or completely wrong. Both are reacting to the same thing: Google is volatile, LLMs have changed user behavior, and the old story of “just publish quality content and you will be fine” has lost most of its predictive power.

White hat vs black hat: why the vibes really are that different

Why white hat editorial SEOs feel so beaten down

If you live in content calendars, briefs, and E-E-A-T decks, it has been a rough stretch. It is not just one update, either. It is the stack of changes: Helpful Content, core updates, AI overviews, and then a slow, grinding decline in organic clicks even when rankings look okay.

You can do everything “right” and still watch traffic fall 40 percent while some thin comparison page on a giant publisher cuts ahead of you for the main money term. I know teams that shipped hundreds of deeply researched guides, did original testing, added authors with real credentials, and still saw their main sites fall off a cliff for 12 to 18 months. That wears people down.

Right now, the pure editorial SEO model feels fragile: too much effort, too much fixed cost, and not enough control over the outcome.

On top of that, many white hat teams never retooled their strategy for a world where AI overviews answer the easy questions and zero-click queries are the default. They are still chasing broad informational topics that LLMs handle in one sentence. That is not just risky, it is a mismatch with how search works now.

Why black hat crews sound almost cheerful

On the other side, in the niches where compliance teams never visit and regulators rarely care, things look very different. I am talking about:

• High-risk affiliate spaces like casinos, betting, and grey-market finance
• Adult and quasi-adult verticals
• Questionable supplements and fringe health offers

In those pockets, AI overviews barely trigger, LLMs are blocked by safety filters, and users still need the ten blue links. That alone changes the mood. Add a search environment where basic churn-and-burn tactics still work and you start to see why people in those circles sound oddly optimistic.

I have seen setups where someone rotates dozens of subdomains on expired brands, uses simple canonical tricks, lets each domain farm money for a week, then throws it away when it burns. No brand, no content strategy, no real UX, just math, tooling, and timing. Is it stable? Not at all. Is it profitable for them right now? Very.

If your time horizon is months and not years, black hat in the right niches probably looks rational, even if you do not like it.

The technical crowd: white hat, but not really playing the same game

There is also a group in the middle that does not fit cleanly into either camp: technical SEOs and data-minded growth people who treat content like inputs to a model, not essays. They sit in dashboards more than Google Docs. They are the ones building:

• Internal tools that mass-generate on-page tests
• LLM-based content systems tuned to specific SERP patterns
• Entity graphs that blend schema, knowledge panels, and off-site mentions

Most of what they do is technically white hat. Nothing hacked, nothing illegal, no obvious spam. But it often feels alien to classic editorial teams, because the writing serves the model first and the reader second. Google can say “write for people” all day; the people winning big often think in vectors, not paragraphs.

I think this is where a lot of the future white hat winners will live: not idealistic bloggers, not reckless churn-and-burn players, but teams that accept that search is mostly machine interpretation and then adjust their content and site structure to speak that machine’s language.

Google is easier to game, and LLMs might be even softer

Why Google feels oddly easy again

For a long time, the story was: each year, gaming Google gets harder. Today, that does not really match what people on the ground see. I do not mean ranking for “what is SEO” with a brand new site, I mean ranking in real commercial spaces with tactics that would have flopped five years ago.

Right now you still see things like:

• Random subdomains on unrelated sites ranking for high-value queries
• Thin affiliate list pages on big publishers outranking specialists
• Small, hyper-focused sites punching way above their weight on brutal keywords

Some of this comes back to topical focus. Google seems far more willing to trust a small, tightly scoped site than a broad content farm with messy categories, even when the big site has far more authority. In practice, that means a clean eight-month-old project can outrank a ten-year-old domain with hundreds of posts if the older site spread itself too thin or looks “SEOed” in a way the new model does not like.

Site type	Old expectation	What happens more often now
Big authority site with broad topics	Wins most commercial terms by default	Wins category heads, struggles with long-tail and mid-tail
Hyper-focused niche site	Stuck on long-tail, slow grind upward	Can leapfrog into high-difficulty terms if structure is clean
News-classified publishers	Strong for news, mixed for evergreen	Can rank mediocre evergreen list posts again and again

The odd part is the gap between what Google says and what ranking data shows. Public messaging still leans on quality, experience, and user value. SERPs in a lot of money categories still reward basic freshness and basic authority over real depth. It is not everywhere, but it is frequent enough that people notice.

LLMs as an SEO target: easier to move, different risks

Outside Google, LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and others now act as discovery engines of their own. People ask them for “best X” lists or “top tools for Y” all day. Those models have to pick brands. They lean heavily on entities, mentions, and patterns in the training data, and almost not at all on classic SEO metrics like domain authority.

I have watched brands that barely register in Ahrefs show up as top recommendations inside these tools, just because someone put in the work to make them look real everywhere that the models scrape: Reddit threads, review platforms, curated lists, roundups, and niche forums.

You can materialize a “real” brand in LLMs faster than you can build a serious organic search presence, if all you care about is recognition and not long term safety.

A simple version of that looks like this:

• Register a plausible name and basic site in a clear niche
• Seed reviews on second-tier review aggregators that LLMs read
• Buy or barter your way into a handful of curated lists on mid-tier blogs
• Have VAs start honest-looking Q&A threads on forums and social groups

Does that cross into deception? In many cases, yes. I am not saying it is ethical. I am saying it is technically simple, and right now it often works. The bigger question is whether that is the type of game you want to be in. I think most real companies should not rely on it as a core tactic.

Why this matters if you run a “normal” business

If you sell software or services or physical products and you plan to exist five years from now, you need a different rule set than someone spinning up affiliate projects or throwaway properties. I disagree with the idea that the only way to win is to go dark-grey or black and lean into every loophole you can find.

For a real brand, the way to use this environment is to accept two facts at once:

• The systems are currently softer than they pretend to be
• Abusing that softness beyond a point will hurt you badly later

So you pick spots where you can compound safely. That usually looks like:

• Entities and mentions: get your brand named in the right places, in real contexts
• Format matching: shape your content to how SERPs and AI overviews currently surface answers
• Risk walls: decide in advance how far you are willing to go in any given channel

Forums, reviews, and social platforms as the new SEO playground

Why forums and Q&A platforms are so easy to abuse

Look at a typical high-intent consumer SERP right now, especially in software, tools, or local services, and count how many results are user-generated platforms. Reddit, Quora, StackExchange variants, niche forums, Facebook groups, Discord indexes, sometimes all on the first page.

Google leans on these because they want signals of “real” discussion. The side effect is that anyone with time, scripts, and a budget can simulate discussion for topics that pay enough. And regular users struggle to tell the difference in many cases.

I think we are closer to the “dead internet” feel in these spaces than most people realize. In certain subreddits around VPNs, trading, or crypto, a huge percentage of the threads around products are manufactured. The usernames look normal. The language is bland, almost corporate, which is its own tell. But to casual readers it passes.

Facebook groups: the next wave of parasite spam

Reddit is not the only target. Facebook groups show up in SERPs for all kinds of local and product queries, and the threshold for “activity” that Google needs to trust them is surprisingly low right now. That creates an open door.

If someone wants to push a local service, they can create a group like “Ask Austin Plumbers” or “Parents of Phoenix” and start answering their own seeded questions with their preferred vendors. It does not take huge engagement. It takes consistency and basic participation patterns.

You see the same play in hobby verticals: camera groups, car tuning groups, local restaurant groups. The admin can steer recommendations in subtle ways, or not-so-subtle ways, and the search results treat the group as neutral discussion even when it is really an owned asset.

Review platforms and the grey line

Review sites are another soft surface. Some platforms are serious about fraud detection. Others look the other way until a story blows up. Either way, LLMs scrape them heavily, and Google often shows their ratings directly in SERPs.

I have heard more stories than I can comfortably ignore about companies quietly seeding reviews on secondary platforms to influence both human buyers and the models that read those pages. Often it is not thousands of fake ratings, it is 50 to 100 very targeted reviews across multiple profiles that fill in the story that the brand wants told.

Personally, I think this crosses the line for real businesses. Once regulators start using the same detection tools that enforcement agencies use for ad fraud, some of these teams will be in trouble. That risk horizon is longer than a standard SEO penalty and harder to reverse. For a short-term affiliate project run out of a shell company, it is a different calculation.

If the tactic looks terrible on the front page of a newspaper with your CEO’s face next to it, it probably should not be part of your long term plan.

Listicles, AI overviews, and why “being on the list” is half the game

AI overviews on Google lean on whatever the main algorithm already trusts. For commercial queries like “best backlink checker” or “email marketing services for nonprofits”, the overview almost always pulls from a small cluster of familiar list posts. Not just the top three results either; often a mix from across the first page.

The implication is simple and a bit uncomfortable: if you want your product mentioned in AI overviews, you either need to own those lists or be present in them. For your own site, that means building list pages that are structured clearly, updated often, and written in the style that overviews can quote cleanly.

For other people’s sites, that often means doing unglamorous outreach and negotiation with publishers who control the slots. In some spaces that is friendly collaboration. In others it is straight up pay-to-play. I do not like it, but pretending it is not happening does not help either.

How to think about risk, ethics, and time horizons

Not every tactic fits every type of business

I think a lot of bad decisions in SEO come from copying tactics without copying the context. What makes sense for a nameless affiliate who plans to flip a site in six months looks reckless for a funded SaaS company with employees and regulators paying attention.

So before you chase any hack, you need three simple filters:

• Legal risk: could this cross into fraud, misrepresentation, or clear violations of advertising rules?
• Platform risk: if you get caught, is the worst outcome a ranking loss, or could you lose ad access, payment processing, or accounts?
• Reputational risk: are you comfortable explaining this choice to your best customers if someone exposes it?

Some people pretend they can dodge those questions. I think that is wishful thinking. Especially as regulators wake up to how much user-generated content is being bought, steered, or outright faked.

Why I think “build for five years” beats “win in three months” for most

There is a reason I push boring things like information architecture, entity consistency, and repeatable publishing systems instead of the tactic-of-the-week. It is not because I dislike clever tricks. It is because I have watched too many teams build on sand, then lose everything in one or two updates.

When you plan on a five-year window, you see work differently. A strong hub page you build today that earns mentions, links, and internal equity is still paying off for you years from now. A topical cluster built to match how users think and how Google groups things can be refreshed, repackaged, and extended.

By contrast, any trick that relies on a specific loophole in a specific platform has a natural end date, even if you cannot see it yet. I am not saying you should never use short-term plays. I am saying they should sit on top of a base that still works when those plays die out.

Founders and marketers should spend less time on SEO and more on brand

This is where I slightly disagree with a lot of classic SEO advice. If you are building a SaaS company, an agency, or even a DTC brand from scratch in 2026, I do not think “start with SEO” is the right move. That used to be reasonable. Now, I think it is backwards.

You will usually get better early traction by:

• Picking one or two social channels where your buyers actually hang out
• Publishing daily content from an identifiable person, not a logo
• Recycling those posts into blog content, email, and basic video

When that engine starts to work, SEO becomes much easier. You already have branded searches. You already have people mentioning you on other sites. You already know which topics your audience cares about, because they told you in comments and replies.

The boring truth is that strong organic search programs in 2026 usually sit on top of strong brand and distribution, not the other way around.

Information architecture still matters more than people admit

I do not want to make this sound like structure is optional. It is not. Many of the sites that got hammered hardest by the Helpful Content Update shared one simple trait: messy, unfocused architecture. They chased every topic in their broad category and sprinkled thin posts everywhere.

A cleaner approach looks closer to this:

• Define 3 to 7 core themes that match your product and audience
• Create one deep, evergreen hub page for each theme
• Build supporting articles that sit under each hub, not all over the place
• Limit how many side topics you touch until that core is healthy

That sounds basic, and in theory everybody “knows” it. In practice, almost nobody follows it strictly, especially once content volume ramps up. That is where trouble starts. I would rather see a site with 40 tight, interlinked pages than 400 scattered ones any day.

Examples of safer vs riskier plays

Tactic	Risk profile	More suited to
Building a focused content hub with author visibility	Low	Brands with long horizons
Buying placements in third-party listicles	Medium, reputational if exposed	Growth-stage SaaS and tools
Owning and steering forum or group discussions about your product	Medium to high, depends on disclosure	Smaller brands, affiliates
Churn-and-burn subdomain spam in high-risk niches	Very high, including legal in some verticals	Short-term affiliate operators only
Seeding fake reviews at scale	High legal and reputational risk	I would argue it fits no responsible business

Practical advice if you are building right now

For SaaS and B2B products

If you lead a SaaS or B2B product, I think the first big decision is this: do you want SEO to be your primary driver or a supporting channel. In this environment, I would choose supporting channel first, then grow it into something bigger over time.

That means you start with:

• Daily content from a founder or visible team member on LinkedIn and one other channel
• A simple site with clear positioning, a pricing page, and 2 to 3 deep problem pages
• One or two search-focused hubs that match the problems your buyers talk about in comments

As that base grows, then you can bring in classic SEO elements: topic clusters, programmatic pages where it makes sense, comparison pages for bottom-of-funnel queries, and so on. If you start by chasing “best X software” with a brand-new site and no audience, you are signing up for pain.

For ecom and DTC brands

Ecom has its own strange mix. Product pages still matter, but the discovery layer lives off-site more than ever: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and creators. I would put most of your early energy into getting products into real hands, real videos, and real conversations.

Your site should support that by:

• Having clean category pages that match how buyers describe your products
• Using simple, consistent structured data for products and reviews
• Creating educational pages that answer specific usage or comparison questions

Parasite plays, like landing product placements in “best gifts” articles or magazine roundups, still help. I just would not rely on them alone. When those vanish, you want your own brand search volume and direct relationships to carry you.

For local and service businesses

Local is oddly conservative and wild at the same time. Google Business Profiles, local citations, and real reviews still underpin most wins. Yet you also see people doing aggressive stuff with lead gen sites, call tracking, and fake listings.

If you are running a real local company, I would stay away from the fake-listing arms race. Instead, lean on:

• A strong, accurate Google Business Profile
• Steady, honest review acquisition from real customers
• A simple site that clearly shows service areas and specific jobs

Then, experiment at the edges. A local Facebook group where you actually help people instead of just pitching. Short video walkthroughs of jobs posted to YouTube and embedded on your site. Those are small, repeatable actions that age well instead of backfiring later.

Where I think the SEO game is really heading

I do not think we are going back to the era where you can build a huge business on informational search traffic alone, no matter how pure your tactics are. Too many queries are handled directly by Google and the LLMs. Too many big publishers have decided to fight for every last affiliate dollar.

At the same time, I do not buy the idea that SEO is “dead” or that only black hat works now. What we are seeing is a reshuffling: technical clarity, strong brand presence, and entity-level thinking matter more; blog volume, generic how-tos, and blind faith in E-E-A-T matter less.

If you are willing to treat SEO as part of a broader system, test your assumptions, and accept that some of the old comforting rules no longer hold, there is still plenty of room to grow. It just might not look like the playbook you used five years ago, and that is probably a good thing.

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