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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.)

To deal with this, the SEOs believe that the search companies have deployed humans of their own--rooms full of them--whose job is to essentially buttress the algorithms' decisions with human ones. "They have to keep this mystery algorithm looking like it's working correctly," says Schoemaker. "So they have all these places around the country where they hire humans to hand-edit results" that have been affected by black-hat and hacking SEO, he says.

"They don't say it openly but I've read enough from Matt Cutts and others to know that this algorithm they purport does everything magically, it's all a bunch of nonsense," says Dave Dellanave, Schoemaker's partner. "The reality is they have probably thousands and thousands of filters that they manually create. And there's no doubt in my mind that increasingly they're using people, the 'human signal,' for rankings."

Critical SEOs contend that this is the only way the search companies can protect their indexes from widespread abuse by black-hat and hacking SEOs. "They're trying to protect their index," says SEO Michael Gray, "because if it's clean, people want to use it, and if people want to use it they can sell advertising. The lower value the search results, the less valuable to users and advertisers."

Cutts says that the "vast majority" of ranking (and of reconsideration requests when a site is delisted) is "algorithmically done." He also contends that "Google is returning more relevant search results in the last year or two."

But critics argue that "relevant" is in the eye of the beholder. The phrase used in the industry for the new direction of search companies is a focus on "trusted and authoritative links." But what makes something trustworthy or authoritative, especially when the search engine can't intuit what a person is looking for to begin with?

Many SEOs say that "trusted and authoritative" is code for "big, well-known company."

"The real direction of search," says SEO Wall, "is that large corporations will dominate search results, and they'll get away with more aggressive SEO because the search engines can't afford to look bad by not having them at the top of results. You're more likely to get enforced against if you use aggressive SEO if you're smaller, not bigger. Small companies will not be able to compete through search."

Many of the SEOs compared this to big-box stores driving locally owned independent stores out of business in small towns. Search results would become dominated by large brands that can afford to keep themselves atop the rankings and that the search companies consider trusted and authoritative, because they're well-known.