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Black Hat SEO, part two: SEOwN3d!!1

As search engine optimizers played fast and loose, a reaction from the search engine companies became inevitable. Now SEOs are forced to choose hats: black or white. (Part two in a series.)

But now the search companies were matching the SEOs' aggressiveness. The effect could be devastating. A site that was blacklisted lost its traffic, and therefore its business, overnight. Usually targeted sites clearly violated search terms of service. But some weren't doing anything differently than they'd been doing for months or years. "When people are ranking for a phrase and supporting their family, and then the next day they're off the map, that's really vicious," says Schoemaker. "You can literally ruin someone's life."

Of course, Google could make the argument that turnabout is fair play. Perhaps enforcement was brusque and arbitrary, but so is black-hat SEO. Nothing Google was doing was illegal, which was an argument the black-hat SEOs had made for years. Plus, as early as 2006, Matt Cutts, Google's chief liaison to the SEO community, had blogged about the ramp-up in enforcement against overly aggressive SEO.

Even before that, the veteran SEO Eric Ward warned others that eventually the free ride would end. Ward was notorious for his cautious, by-the-book approach to link-building strategies. Some called him "a poser," "arrogant" and "retarded," and bestowed him with the nickname "Linkmoses."

"I understand why [the search engines] are doing it, but their enforcement has become a little heavy-handed," says SEO Michael Gray. Says Aaron Wall, another SEO: "Google went on a crusade."

The Aftermath of the Crusade

As frustrating as delisting was for companies suddenly punished by SEO enforcement, getting relisted proved to be a much worse problem. SEOs and site owners found themselves stuck with little communication from the search companies about what they had done wrong or how to fix it to get back in the good graces of the algorithms. Schoemaker himself lost the top spot for ring-tone searches.

"I was making thousands of dollars a day, and then one day I was out of Google," he says. "I inquired why and never really got an answer. They said it was normal search engine fluctuation"--fluctuation, he notes, that also can be caused by black-hat SEOs. "I probably got gamed out," he suggests. He currently ranks about tenth in ring tones.

Google also partnered with Stopbadware.org to blacklist sites that were potentially infected with malware. Last September, a Web-hosting company in Thailand was hacked and several sites that used the host were flagged on Google, so that if users clicked on a link to the site, an intermediate screen popped up warning them that the site they were about to visit was potentially infected.

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