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Blackhat – The Dark Side of Search Engine Optimization

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=pagerank&st=cse&scp=2

In the information-dominated world, hundreds of millions of people turn to search engines like Google in response to their daily needs. Much of Google’s success comes from their decision to separate advertiser-funded results from the “organic” results that its engine believes are best. Users also recognize this difference and subsequently tend to focus on organic, rather than paid results. In fact, Daniel Ruby, an employee of the online advertising network Chikita, concluded that an average of thirty-four percent of Google’s traffic went to the first organic result. Unsurprisingly, many companies put tremendous effort into optimizing Google results for relevant keywords. Some of these endeavors include attempting “blackhat” techniques that cheat Google’s system.

Last November, J. C. Penney was startlingly favorable on Google. Searches for “home décor,” “living room furniture,” and many other keywords all linked to J. C. Penney at or near the top. A search for “Samsonite carry on luggage” even outranked Samsonite.com. Upon closer examination, however, J. C. Penney’s success was hardly the result of supreme content and information.

It is generally known that one of the most important factors of determining a website’s search rank is the number of links that point back to that site. In the above example, J. C. Penney’s marketing company exploited this algorithm by paying thousands of websites, many of which were inactive ghost pages, to link relevant anchor text to their site.

Considering J. C. Penney’s huge success with the marketing campaign, many webmasters surely wonder if they can similarly manipulate their rankings. However, dominating search results is not quite so easy. Google quickly recognized a violation of its policies, and within a mere two hours, J. C. Penney fell from the top result for “Samsonite carry on luggage” to the seventy-first position. Harsh as this reduction was, it fails to compare to Google’s punishment of BMW – when Google found that the automobile company was using blackhat techniques, it temporarily purged all instances of the company’s website from all search results. In addition to these harsh punishments, Google continually increases its measures to ensure result quality – its page ranking algorithm, though still based largely on links, is far more advanced – and significantly less well known – than the one discussed in class. Even so, there is still a tremendous market for those willing to challenge the Internet search giants. According to link-selling professional Mark Stevens, it is possible to circumvent Google’s safeguards by understanding how the engine works. For example, he notes that Google flags any website that rapidly grows from zero to many links. Search engines like Google are in a constant battle with blackhat specialists to create improved and harder to manipulate search algorithms. Considering a search for “search engine optimization” results in a Wikipedia page rather than a considerably more profitable business website, I would say Google is winning.

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