Blue Hat SEO was one of the original SEO blogs. Back when most of the industry was still arguing about meta keywords and keyword density, Eli was writing about link laundering, automated systems, and the actual mechanics of how search engines decided what to rank. The stuff that actually moved the needle.

I found this site early in my career, and it fundamentally shaped how I think about SEO. Not the surface-level “best practices” that get recycled in every beginner guide - the real mechanics. Why things work. What the constraints are. How to think about the problem instead of just following a checklist.

That foundation has served me incredibly well. It’s the reason I approach SEO the way I do today.

When the domain registration lapsed and it hit the auction block, I bought it. Felt like I had to. Too much good thinking here to let it get turned into a PBN site or other spam play… though that would have been delightfully ironic.

So this is an archive. The original content, restored as faithfully as I could manage, just pushed into a new, mobile-friendly theme. The old, original version (as much as I could scrape from internet archive) is at old.bluehatseo.com. Some of it is dated - tactics that worked in 2007 don’t all work in 2026. But the underlying logic? The way Eli thought about problems? That’s still worth reading.

Most SEOs working today entered the industry long after this site went dark. If you’re one of them, this is where a lot of the ideas you take for granted came from.

- Ian Howells