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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.

Patel, meanwhile, has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and is also a regular conference speaker. Last year at BlogWorld Expo, after he gave a presentation on SEO and search marketing, someone said to him, "I can't believe you can look at yourself in the mirror in the morning."

The Gray Business of Gaming the System

It turns out that in ancient Rome, those augurs' divinations weren't always divine. The will of the gods sometimes depended on earthly influences like political favors and bribery.

SEO is not so different from this, either. Pay the right price, and SEOs can game the system for you by telling the algorithms little digital fibs, or sometimes deceiving them outright. This is black-hat SEO, which is a misnomer. In general, these practices aren't illegal, just dishonest, as Naylor notes when distinguishing between black-hat hacking and black-hat SEO. (Some SEOs do call this gray-hat SEO; the nomenclature is muddied.)

Black-hat SEO is based on a simple fact: No matter how clever one makes an algorithm, it's still just a narrow set of rules. Like all binary machines, it struggles to intuit even basic human intent. Software struggles to detect duplicity. In a way, the algorithms are like robotic consumers, who are incapable of being skeptical about aggressive, deceptive marketing practices.

Black-hat SEO techniques include misleading forms of link bait--for example, fabricating a salacious news story ("Britney Spears Dead!") that spurs prurient curiosity traffic. It's clearly a ruse to generate clickthroughs, but the algorithms see a popular link that deserves juice. Also there's blogspam: links planted in the comments fields of blogs despite the fact they have nothing to do with the blog's content or the present conversation. The algorithms once counted up those links and gave juice to the site they linked to. Automation of this process allowed an SEO to plant thousands of links a day and vault to the top of the search rankings.

Another favorite technique of black-hat SEOs is cloaking--making the search spiders see content that the public can't see, thus tricking the algorithm into giving too much juice. Cloaking is like saying one million people read this story because that's how many people were in the stores that sold the magazine that the story appeared in.

Black-hat SEO is even more wildly effective than the more legitimate forms of SEO because it is not restrained by truthfulness. If you're willing to bend or break the search companies' terms of service, you can get serious juice unavailable to someone who plays by the rules. The bartender who skims the till always makes more than the one who doesn't. (Unless, of course, he gets caught.)