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Black Hat SEOs: Is This the Future of Search?

Search Engine Optimization is the trick to winning online revenue. What happens when hackers start going after the prize? Part one of a two-part series.

But Naylor didn't have an appetite for hacking. SEOs may have a less-defined code of business ethics than most, but it's a code nonetheless. They like to say that hackers break the law, while they merely break a search company's terms of service. "When I get caught, which I do, I get kicked off a search engine for a while," Naylor says. "When hackers get caught, they go to prison."

But now Naylor was thinking that distinction would fade. Eventually, SEO would become big business for bad guys, like spam and identity theft. It has already started. Al Gore's ecology blog was hacked late last year, but not for political reasons. It was hacked so that some guy marketing Xanax and Viagra could plant links to boost his search rankings.

Security researcher Jeremiah Grossman calls the phenomenon SEOwN3d!!1--merging SEO with hackers' leetspeak slang for "hacked." It's a powerful merging of cultures and interests that has the ability to change the nature and value of search engines themselves.

Naylor opted out, retired from the black-hat SEO business. He didn't want any part of whatever it was becoming. "I never felt comfortable in that world," he says of hacking. "You look down the road and just see it's not something you can build a business on, a life on. All the things we used to do, it just seems easier to hire a hacker now. It's a little bit sad in a way."

Augurs of Search

Currently, the best way to find approximately what you need on the Internet is to submit an idea to a search engine and in return receive a list of links to sites related, somehow, to your idea.

Really, the only links that matter are the first five or so, because few people bother to scroll past what they first see; almost no one clicks to the second page of results or beyond. Website owners know this and therefore compete for the top spots. If a site does not rank highly, it is in some sense virtually nonexistent.
To determine who earns this prime real estate, search engine companies send small software programs called spiders (or crawlers or robots) to scuttle around the Internet and collect information about websites--their location, what words are on the page, what links lead to and leave from the site, and more. The spiders dump that information into mighty algorithms that reckon the sites' relevance and credibility. These algorithms are proprietary and somewhat mysterious; no one outside of the search companies knows precisely how they work. Some argue that even the search companies don't know exactly how they work anymore, because the algorithms are constantly changed and have become colossally complex.