Home » Data Protection » Malware/Cybercrime

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.

Many SEOs are willing to bend the rules. It's not uncommon for an SEO consulting to major companies to use grayer SEO for his own business. "I've never met a so-called white-hat SEO that didn't have some black-hat tricks," says Schoemaker. "The same SEO that has large companies as clients probably also has a Viagra business."

Schoemaker was not talking about Neil Patel, but he could have been. In addition to owning ACS, Patel runs his own SEO and search marketing programs focused on gambling and debt consolidation websites. (Search marketing tends to thrive in what Schoemaker calls "scammy" industries. The big three are referred to as PPC--porn, pills and casinos. He also lists ring tones and mortgage services.)

Patel makes "much more" money from this other business, though he won't say how much. Jeremiah Grossman is quite certain a good black-hat SEO can clear seven figures in a year.

SEOs and search marketers use the higher-risk tactics mostly for themselves, but companies partake in it, too, according to every SEO interviewed for this story. Typically, once a company learns about SEO, the catch-22 becomes clear. Use it and you can reach those aggressive online revenue goals, but you're toeing the ethical line. Don't use it and claim the moral high ground, as your competitors who do use it game you out of the top search results.

Naylor says that when he was a black-hat SEO, "a lot of corporate sites didn't want white-hat SEO. They wanted gray-hat SEO. They'd dip the toes a little bit deeper." A few companies have been caught using black-hat SEO tactics and were temporarily banned from Google. Cloaking got BMW's and Ricoh's sites in Germany temporarily banned from Google, and many SEOs accused the New York Times of cloaking by making the algorithms see subscriber-only content that the rest of the world had to pay to see. (The Times has since abandoned its subscription model online.) Some companies even use reverse-black-hat SEO--getting competitors' rankings to drop rather than their own to increase. Pull the mountain down rather than scale it, a request Naylor says he's refused many times. "That's become almost as big a business" as SEO, says Dave Dellanave, Schoemaker's partner.

Patel insists repeatedly that the work he does for ACS clients is completely aboveboard. "I keep those worlds totally separate. A major company doesn't need the other tactics. They're linked to [by other sites] naturally. You don't have to build links
for them."