Black Hat SEO + Hackers = The End of Google Relevance?
Until recently, Google was used by hackers mainly as an excellent source of easy potential hacking targets. With over 8 billion pages indexed and only a small percentage of users knowledgeable about internet security, it was easy to find the websites that could be hacked virtually on a fly. Rather advanced system of Google search operators facilitated this task even further.
Another way to quickly identify the topics of interest and of increased popularity is of course by Keeping eye on Google trends (yet another invaluable tool for both hackers and SEO specialists).
While hackers were playing their games, Black Hat SEO guys were playing theirs, dominating many lucrative SERPs and cashing in on a free targeted traffic.
But to the best of my knowledge, they were not combining their forces, at least at large scale.
Well, now they do.
SEO specialists from Poland identified one of the factors which are currently heavily used by Google to define relevancy of the search results. I’m talking about the velocity. In lame terms velocity is nothing more than the “freshness” of the particular post and links. The more recent the post is, the bigger its weight. Sure, there are many other factors that are taken into consideration as well – such as the number of incoming links, domain age, etc. I’m talking about velocity here, because that’s what allowed seo pros to exploit Google algorithm and, along with artificially generated incoming links, get millions of pages ranked for the keywords of their choice.
This is impressive on its own, though disturbing. What’s even more disturbing, they combine their efforts with hackers, and all those pages were filled with specific type of malware.
Panda Security Labs identified a list of keywords that were compromised. To be more precise, the top SERPs for those keywords displayed absolutely irrelevant results linked to some domains in Warsawa:
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/04/14/seo-blackhatters-target-ford-via-google
On second thought, it doesn’t mean that hackers and SEO pros are from Poland. It only means that they control the server in Poland, and the domain from Poland.
posted in Internet Security Paradigms and Models, Main, Online Business Security, Website Security | 0 Comments
