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.

So while the search companies would suss out the most blatant scams, careful black-hat SEOs could thrive. The key was restraint. "Game the system, just not so forcefully that you're noticed." Naylor says that was a good rule of thumb.

And periodically, the search companies were stirred to action by the effect SEO was having on search results. Sometimes, for example, SEOs could knock a company out of the top result for searches on that company's name. One day in late 2006, the top result for searches on the term "trump" suddenly changed from that company's site to a site selling erectile dysfunction drugs.

Search companies know this makes their product look bad and "that threatens their business model, which relies on advertisers paying them to deliver quality search results that many people will continue to use," says Schoemaker. "So they react when it happens, but they don't seem to care until people notice."
The first time search companies tried to neutralize black-hat SEO came soon after search started to flourish, almost a decade ago. Back then, the algorithms focused on the page itself and what was on it, specifically keywords that would match what people searched for. To boost their rankings, sites manipulated keywords forcefully. "They had 40 or 50 techniques they used to do this," says SEO Eric Ward. (Ward says he does not use black-hat SEO techniques.) Sometimes site owners would just spill a sea of keywords at the bottom of a page. Sometimes they'd hide them behind images or make them the same color as the page's background. The principle was to include as many keywords on the page as possible, to increase the likelihood any given search would match the keywords and draw the site into search results.

When this got out of hand, the search companies tweaked the algorithms and shifted the rules from trusting keywords the most to trusting links the most. (The presumption, of course, is that website owners and content producers will try to cheat. They are trusted the least.) This made link building the center of all SEO strategies.
In principle, the idea is sound. A site can be judged by the company it keeps. But there were problems. At first, the algorithms seemed to value link volume the most, and that spurred link farms--pages full of nothing but links that the SEOs tricked people into visiting to create a self-sustaining constellation of juice. In response, the search companies altered the algorithms to value "authoritative links"--those from other sites who were already considered valuable themselves.