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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.)

So those who run the hacked site are mad at the hacking SEO. Customers are mad at the hacked site and at the search engine for bringing them to a hacked site. A company is mad about paying money to someone who didn't earn it, while someone who should have earned it is mad at the company and the other hacking SEO.

Where there's collateral damage, there's litigation. A few lawyers have started looking at the space as possible fertile ground.

"It's quite possible that the next few years will see some lawsuits against providers that allege the use of SEO tactics," writes James Grimmelmann in an Iowa Law Review article from last November about the ambiguous state of search engine law. While he notes some challenges of suing based on SEO, he also notes, "Courts have recognized that some techniques of content design are deceptively manipulative and cause harm to legitimate providers, and it is possible that innovative pleading could properly state other business torts against manipulators. Similarly, luring users to one's content through SEO raises significant false-advertising concerns. In these cases, competitors, users and consumer-protection agencies might all be proper plaintiffs."

But that's speculation. Naylor, among others, says that aggressive and illegal forms of SEO have already had more tangible effects on the Internet and what it's good for--or rather what it's no longer good for.

"One of the things black-hat SEOs did, and did very, very well, was to go into Web landscapes and just destroy them," says Naylor. "I mean, at one time people liked having guest books on their sites, and SEOs just filled them with all these links to the point they became unusable. Now why would you have a guest book? It's asking for trouble. Why would you let people put comments on your blog? Are you crazy?"

The optimizers are changing what's valuable online, by changing what looks valuable because it ranks high in a search. Black-hat SEOs, and now hacking SEOs, are so good at their craft that they force search companies to constantly change the algorithms and filters. The factors that give a site juice are in some ways the ones that SEOs haven't yet exploited.

Some SEOs argue that no online feature exists that they won't be able to game. What black-hat SEO demonstrates, they say, is that the search algorithm isn't magic at all. It's just software that, once understood, is easily outwitted by humans.