SEO News Blog

I just stumbled on one very interesting article in the Forbes Magazine titled The Saboteurs Of Search which I find quite interesting because it somehow answers some serious SEO questions about spam and possible penalization for your or competitor website.

Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling links onto a competitor’s site to reduce its search rank isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult. “We try to be mindful of when a technique can be abused and make our algorithm robust against it,” he says. “I won’t go out on a limb and say it’s impossible. But Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in practice.”

Cutts also points out that any potential for sabotage exists across all search engines. “It really should be called ’search engine bowling,’ ” he says.

I’m not sure what this will lead, but most definitely will make some people try cyber terrorism and buy some bad neighbourhood links for their competition and see what happens. I already stumbled across few threads on DP where people were looking for adult related links and similar to point to their competitors.

Now Matt doesn’t really say what will be the punishment and how harsh it will be especially after the fact that they know this technique can be used on competitors and is a way of cyber terrorism, but we can most definitely observe and listen to what’s happening around us and if there is a way to penalize I bet that eventually we will hear someone screaming that lost ranking for no particular reason or got his competitor out.

In reality black hat seo offers few very interesting techniques that can be easily done to manipulate and punish small to medium sized websites. The easiest way is the direct duplicate content penalty where the website that has highest pagerank is assumed to be the origin of the content and basically if you have higher pr website you can just copy the content of your targeted website or at least the main pages that are their landing pages, and sit back and watch their rankings drop. The problem with that trick is that you will be clearly identified as the attacker, but if you got your tracks covered with privacy and pay pal payments there is no problem. (I’m not giving you ideas).

Search Engine Link Spam is clearly the second case, and everyone know that if they participate in link farming projects they can get penalized.

I’ll bring updates as they come.