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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.)

Another illegal technique a bot might be used for is cookie stuffing. Here's one cookie-stuffing scheme: Around tax time, a hacking SEO uses compromised sites to secretly inject cookies onto the computers of site visitors. On those cookies are referral links to the tax prep websites. If my machine had been stuffed with one of those cookies, the person who put it there would collect a referral fee when I signed up to use one the tax prep sites.

Many experts believe this is only the beginning and that, because there's so much money to be made off the search business model, the techniques will get more sophisticated and far more clever. "From my point of view," says Grossman, "it's just getting started."

Even Linkmoses held no illusions that Google's crackdown would eliminate black-hat SEO. "Enforcement means higher rankings will go to creators of truly awesome content, and bad guys," he says. "It's been a game of leapfrog since day one. There won't ever be a time when people won't game the system."

David Naylor believes that black-hat SEO has gotten so good that search itself is being devalued. Trust has eroded. "You type a search into Google and believe what comes back in the number-one slot is the truth, and it's not," he says. "It's often some version of the truth engineered by very clever people trying to make a lot of money."

The SEOwN3d!!1 Effect

Just as auguries' decisions about the observed flight patterns of birds reverberated through Rome, affecting religion, the outcomes of wars and the fate of rulers, so too do the effects of SEO schemes ripple across the Internet--affecting how SEO is used, what it's good for and what it will look like in the future.

As SEO migrates to illegal activity, the primary effect is the collateral damage it creates. A report from Websense, the Internet filtering company, estimated that 51 percent of sites hosting malware now are legitimate sites that have been compromised, and many of those are compromised for SEO and search marketing schemes.

A simple cookie-stuffing program illustrates the havoc SEOs and search marketers can create. Cookie stuffing involves the illegal access of an innocent site, which is then used to serve illicit code to customers without their knowledge, based on their arriving there through a search engine. Meanwhile, a company is paying referral fees to search marketers who haven't earned that fee while possibly taking those fees away from people who had earned them but whose legitimate referrals were overwritten by the cookie stuffer.