Hackers and Spammers, How will the industry survive
- 10th Mar 2008
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- Internet Marketing
I don’t think this is any secret, well I hope it isn’t, thats the 2 worlds are getting closer and closer. This year I have had suggestions like: (which I would like to state I haven’t done any of them):
a) Can you market this idea, we hack into a competitors server, then add a load of gateway pages, get some TLA links, and ping your competitor is gone.
b) We Hack your competitor, and add Robots.txt file to kill the site or No-follow every Internal link.
c) We can Hack site for Links, Edu are easy, Gov’s are more risky so I have to charge $25 dollars extra.
d) We can hack large PR site and put your competitor sites on them to cause dupe content issues.
e) We have large amounts of Data from XXXXXX search engine, users email and passwords.. any ideas what to do with it.
f) We have all the data from this website XXXXXX you want a copy.
g) We can get anything PR4 or below removed from Google within 3 weeks, example sites are …..
h) We can buy links on a network that will get the client banned.
i) Can you blog a month of link buys, where you out sites that are buying links. We will pay you £20,000 you have to mention site xxxxx.co.uk and here is the bought links report.
I remember having a chat with some Webmasters and some Googlers about if your purchased links to a competitors site could you get it banned, the Googlers obviously said why would you do that, you run the risk off helping them rank better, my argument has always been if you spend 10 million on PPC and just move 10 % into competitor disruption you will cost them a lot more if you can knock them from above you, yes you run the risk of making them rank better, but hey they rank better already..
Anyway I see this year has been the worst for Blackhat SEO we have ever seen, so the best Whitehat advice I can give at the moment is take an audit.
a) Who has access to the Site
b) Set up weekly checks, document changes, folder creation, user creation
c) Get your backlinks in order, set up webmaster style consoles with the search engines and archive off the data.
d) Start a record of events, on this date we employed SEO abc company, on this date we use Mr XXXXX for viral campaign
c) Check what’s happening in your industry and log that and form strategic partnerships with your competitors where you can.
e) Don’t trust anyone
DaveN
10 Comments | Leave a comment »
Well as you said “Don’t trust anyone” covers 97,86% of everything.
Anyway, reporting scrappers, reporting links, reporting everything wrong you notice helps allot. Yes you have to be clean or you may unintentionally open whole can of worms but you have no choice anyway.
Its a shame it has come to this, but its true.
I know a real case of this.
ZuneBoards owner lpx hired a hacker to hack the competition. (ZuneScene), the hacker gained their database and took their site offline for 36hours. Now ZuneBoards has taken the lead as the largest Zune Community.
Its not right when people hack to defeat the competition.
Its a shame there arent any authorities to report to, or i would be there.
>Its not right when people hack to defeat the competition.
Are there any legitimate reasons to hack? All of it is breaking and entering….
why are hackers and crackers doing this crap.
[…] David Naylor mentioned it, nowadays black hat seo’s/hackers are starting to realize the potential of […]
@amelia same old answer because they can
All these things have been possible aleady. The thing is they are mostly illegal. Messing with backlinks is ok but messing with someone’s server with malicious intent is possible prison time.
Of course proxy ip’s can help but if I was doing that shit I would be extra careful.
Why people do “google bowling” to competition?
Because they can.
It’s google issue.
We need some long jail terms for people caught doing it. It’s not really happened much yet (at all?). That would be a HUGE deterrent.
“Are there any legitimate reasons to hack? All of it is breaking and entering….”
Yes, there are in fact. What DaveN is referring to in this post is not hacking. It’s cracking and there’s a big difference. Most hackers have ethics (I know how that sounds but it’s true) and use their talents to INCREASE security (by exposing/finding, then fixing the holes). Crackers do things like break security for non-sanctioned self-gain (i.e. take down competitor sites to increase rankings). A true “hacker” in this industry would probably doing things more along the lines of closing XSS holes and making sites less vulnerable to blackhat SEOs.
This brings up a good point though. What’s the difference between a Blackhat SEO who games Google and one who attacks a competitor? I’m not sure but it doesn’t seem to me like the same thing. I can see both sides of that argument though so that’s just my current opinion.