It’s not often that SEOs talk about security- the reasons seem to be either a lack of knowledge, or simply a lack of interest. Last April I posted a blog covering how an attacker could go about inserting spammy links into a site (hidden or obfuscated in some way to avoid detection) and leech the host site’s authority and strength to utterly rubbish sites.
If the host site’s web master never finds the links their site starts to die- as the engines see it becoming less and less valuable. If the host site is predominantly reliant on organic traffic this can be disastrous. Yesterday Matt Cutts posted his video and slides discussing pretty much the same thing, he calls it blight.
What interests me about this is that in order to work out what’s happening and remedy it you have to understand the motives and techniques that a spammer/attacker uses. Without this knowledge you are in the dark.
My point is that SEO as a discipline continues to grow. It is no longer acceptable for your SEO to just understand the narrow SEO remit, to be truly effective they should understand how technologies work, how applications and websites are built and how you break and manipulate them- we do, but I hope we’re not the minority.
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