A few years ago I was successful with blackhat SEO. I will explain what I learned about SEO, how my blackhat trick worked, and how SEO could work now. <br><br> Marketers are mostly bullshitters, so most content on the Web about SEO is bullshit. Google lies about what matters, and marketers repeat Google's lies. Since Google overcomplicates everything they do, I assume there are millions of factors that go into SEO. But some factors are much more important than others. <br><br> Google's original algorithm was based on links. This was quickly abused and so links by themselves no longer count. What Google looks at now primarily is user behavior. It can do this because it owns Chrome. So basically Google spies on everyone and ranks sites based on user behavior. <br><br> When I did blackhat, what worked was getting users to click on a link to my site and then having them be engaged there. So link-clicks + engagement. Since I couldn't do this organically, I faked it. I had another active free site and when users went there, I used Javascript to open my target site in another tab. Then I used Javascript to fake user activity for a while and then close the tab. With this trick, I ranked highly on competitive keywords. After a year, Google figured this out and stopped counting fake Javascript engagement. <br><br> So how could this be applied today? I have an idea which is only speculation. Suppose you have some online service that you want to charge for, say www.legaldocs.com . So you make another site free.legaldocs.com that is a free version. All pages have a link rel="canonical" to the paid site. Then you try to get the free site to go viral. The hope is that this gets the paid site ranked on Google. If anyone tries this, let me know what happens.