Home » Data Protection » Malware/Cybercrime

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.)

"Google can shut you down at any time," says RSnake. "But there are all kinds of weird things that could happen to you, upstream problems, a proxy goes bad, someone takes over your site, and there's no way for you to explain that it might not be your fault. They're making false assumptions about how the Internet works, which is that the owner of the IP address is always in control of what happens through that IP address." (Indeed, some black-hat SEOs seized on the opportunity and complained about competitors' sites in hopes that they could get them manually pushed out of the rankings.)

Still, Google's policy of flagging sites and aggressively delisting any site using black-hat SEO remains in place, and by January of this year, Ward felt vindicated for his conservative approach to SEO. About the crackdown on black-hat SEO, a gloating Linkmoses (he has embraced the nickname) wrote a blog entry, "Don't Blame Google for Your Linking Failures":

In 2007, many long-practiced link building tactics stopped being effective. Many link building companies and consultants sold the exact tactics/services that are now useless. Why didn't you see this coming, and if you did, why did you sell those services in the first place and what services will you sell now?... Are you really going to tell me you are shocked that Google no longer thinks a link from link-o-matic, link-to-my-loo, and LinksForNoGoodReason.com are of any value? Please. But if you knew that such links would someday lose value, why did you take money for that very service? And if you didn't honestly know such links were pointless, how can you call yourself a link builder? Google's focus on trusted sources is your worst nightmare.

The Devil They Didn't Know

Certainly gray techniques are still being used by SEOs, and they always will be; Schoemaker recently uncovered a ring-tone business that had come up with a way to take up all the Google AdWords paid-links results for any given search. He estimated that the scheme could net $1 million in four months, and he was surprised Google hadn't banned the company yet.

Still, the crackdown has had an effect. It appears to be cleaving the business. Many SEOs are going more white hat, if you will, and a few have decided to go full-out black hat--a phenomenon that security researcher Jeremiah Grossman calls "SEOwN3d!!1", a mash-up of SEO and hacker slang for compromising a site.