Financial times explores the dark side of SEO
19th July 2010 by William Hobson
The disreputable side of search engine optimisation, blackhat SEO, is hardly a new problem for the online world. However according to the Financial Times the tactics are increasingly used less as a search engine marketing technique and increasingly by cyber criminals looking to deliver malware to unsuspecting web users.
According to the FT, blackhat SEOs are taking new approaches to linkbuilding and keyword loaded content generation. Rather than create their own temporary sites to build links or spamming web pages with keywords, the new approach sees ‘blackhats’ hack into sites with strong rankings and insert links to their own pages, as well as stealing content from the site to use on their own website in a bid to appropriate some of their relevancy.
Another growing trend is the tactic of piggybacking on trending results. M86 security group tells the FT that within 24 hours of the Earthquake in Haiti, three of the top 10 Google results were pages loaded with malware. M86′s vice president, Bradley Anstis, says that the number of blackhat links is tripling every year with the majority found hidden away on legitimate but hacked websites.
The malware websites themselves also make use of every blackhat SEO tactic available. One of the key methods for fooling both Google and search engine users is to script the website so that when the website is crawled, it presents a different, malware-free and SEO friendly image to the one that a user would see if they accessed the website.
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