While carrying out competitor analysis for clients I am increasingly coming across blatant black hat SEO practices that were once banned from the index.
Normally the process on discovery is clear. You report it to the web spam team and it disappears. However, lately the web spam submission form appears to be a black hole.
So is web spam, hidden text and cloaking now okay? Where has the web spam team gone?
When you consider this interesting post about paid links, you have to ask a few questions:
- Is Google concentrating too much on world domination and lost its concentration on the customer?
- Are the advertising dollars from customers helping them ‘overlook’ certain practices?
Whether sinister or not one thing is for sure; black hat is back. Let’s look at three excellent examples of black hat.
Web spam and cloaking respectively are at the top of the results for any search on rugby spread betting on google.co.uk. The two websites in question clearly provide different data to Google than to users. For hidden text we need look no further than a legitimate player, who seemingly can get away with hidden <H1> titles and not get penalised. Even after these sites were reported they keep on trucking.
Web spam: www.britishinformation.com/
Taking a look at this site, the entire content is Adwords which cannot be indexed. It serves no useful propose than to drive advertising revenues for themselves, and oh, Google!
Cloaking: www.sportsspread.com/
The entire page is different in Google than the actual code of the page being presented. As a highlight have a look at the different meta-descriptions.
Actual meta-description:
<meta name="description" content=" Sport spread betting is Profitable spread trading for you to Gamble and profit. We offer Online Spread Betting Golf Gambling, NFL Betting Spread, and Betting Cricket Spread for you to gamble and win. ”>
Cloaked meta-description:
<meta name="description" content="SportsSpread.com is an online tax free sport betting company for sports spread betting. Before betting online see our competitive spread betting prices and promotions." />
Hidden text: http://www.vistaprint.co.uk
This perfectly nice page has some great hidden headings that only appear to Google. Look for the two headings in the cache that show “Photo Calendars, Personalised desk Calendars”. A clear example of manipulation as these have no clear or obvious accessibility advantages for impaired users.
But despite these problems being reported to Google and a loud complaint on the webmasters portal Google appear blind. I the same vain as the recent post on paid links, I am really beginning to question whether Google cares anymore. They have failed to respond to every request. Does this mean silence is the new black?
Julian Grainger is an internet consultant and guest blogger for Econsultancy.
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Production Lead - Mobile at Vodafone
11:41AM on 7th January 2010
Interesting article. Just to let you knwo that some of the links in there seem to point to the wrong places, though - in particular the British Information 'site' and 'content' links.
11:47AM on 7th January 2010
Good article, Google doesn't seem to care any more. It's all about AdWords and revenue, the actual directory listings are getting more and more muddied.
Seems to me that a lot of people have a small amount of SEO knowledge and they are running with it and the safeguards to prevent them flooding the engines just aren't there any more.
12:00PM on 7th January 2010
Black hat is back? - Black hat never went away in the first place. In some industries some form of search manipulation techniques have to be employed to get ahead. If it continues to work then people will contine to use this form of SEO.
Director at WhyCommunicate?
12:05PM on 7th January 2010
Interesting article. These are less blatant than many others i have seen in several other very competitive sectors.
Ultimately SEO in some cases in coming down to a reward versus risk model. A 30 day ban may be worth the risk financially.
12:18PM on 7th January 2010
agree with Jason - black hat never went away and is necessary in some competitive industries. you still see some schoolboy level black hat techniques like hidden text used on pages that rank which i've never really understood as I can't imagine it makes such a big difference on a link heavy algorithm like Google's.
I think in some cases it comes down to whether the search engines have picked spam up algorithmically, or if they're relying on spam reports. I also think the engines are using satisfaction metrics like bounce rate, time on site, volume of queries performed in timeframe etc. when judging quality, and if satisfaction rates are high for a site then that suggests a relevant result for the user, regardless of tactics used to get there in the first place... and ultimately user satisfaction is what the engines are aiming for.
1:26PM on 7th January 2010
Garry's right here. While people can get away with Black Hat with very little risk, they'll keep on doing it.
The problem comes when you take a white hat only stance. Call it naive, but sometimes you have to play things by the book for clients, and there's nothing worse than telling them someone's taking their business through "cheating".
It's frustrating, to say the least.
4:50PM on 7th January 2010
Checking Google's search result for SportsSpread.com it seems the homepage rather than the frameset is being indexed. Therefore is Google simply ignoring the frameset and showing the true homepage content, taking any unfair advantage / poor user experience out of equation?
Interestingly, Bing's search result for the same site actually displays the cloaked content from the frameset (body not meta).
It would be worth an expert validating this but looks like Google has spotted it and Bing has taken the bait...
8:34PM on 7th January 2010
AFAIK, breaking guidelines doesn't necessarily result in a penalty or ban.
Given the way dynamic content is structured, it may be unavoidable to have content version 1 show for Googlebot and content 3.x show for a regular user?
Things like hidden content, text in the same colour as the background, if I can remember were reasons for bans with Search Engines pre-Google - like Alta Vista, MSN, Yahoo.. But they also (and MSN still reads/allows 2 keywords in the meta-keywords) read the meta-keywords and meta-description for ranking whereas Google state clearly that they don't.
I look at it this way: you can could put hidden text but without authority, your site won't show - hidden or visible. Even if you don't have the text on the page, you can still show (e.g. Google Bombing - which may be dead but you can still show without the text on the page). We still don't seem to be able to get over the authority part of the ranking principle...Text doesn't bestow authority.
I'd say that the paid links form/spam form must probably generate tonnes of spam - no doubt the user validated one in the Webmasters Tools carries more weight. If you imagine how many sites are hit with spam, how easy would it be to just report your competitor?
6:35AM on 8th January 2010
Interesting article, though observing this trend of websites with black hat SEO ranking on top Google SERPs for quite a long time now.
Director at Bold Internet Ltd
9:30AM on 8th January 2010
Thanks for the post.
As already mentioned, black hat has never gone away and anytime there's a very lucrative market, it is only to be expected that people are going to 'bend rules'.
12:00PM on 8th January 2010
Thanks for the article. As a I SEO DIYer this is really dissappointing as we spend effort in our SEO through playing the books as we could not afford to be penalised. Makes you think...
3:33PM on 8th January 2010
@Scott - but Google's rules are very clear on their site and their blog. You have to becareful that just because someone writes a post or builds a site around things you could be penalised for - doesn't mean they really are.
One of the biggest myths is that Duplicate content can result in a penalty - but that doesn't stop self styled experts from blogging about it or preaching about in forum's or websites.
CEO at SARTEPENSO
5:25PM on 8th January 2010
The article is very good, thank you.
You may find interesting a few things I will add as comment.
Google recent changes (Caffeine) are not the only source for the return of old school black hat techniques (Google Bombing).
By continuously seeking to improve their results with the user behavior and also the market growth is by me their major leak and a very important source of holes black hat webmasters will use.
What you observed is mainly a matter of backlinks and bad handling of frames.
Google’s lack to deal with new links VS old links is in fact an old horse. To address the freshness of content they added some algorithm dealing with the backlinks freshness. This is surely something that favorites Google Bombing.
Everyone will agree that Google Bombing is the first black hat technique any monkey can learn. As we can see on the yahoo siteexplorer, the website you mentioned does have some backlinks.
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.britishinformation.com&fr=sfp&bwm=i
If you had some frames with it you will see the result you pointed out.
This was a very old technique in 2001 to 2003. It seems like we went back to the old ages.
About Vistaprint, it’s very funny to see that example. Almost 18 month ago I have been short listed to be Mister SEO in Europe and while talking with the person in charge of it in the USA, I found they were to much objectives oriented, at the point to forget the good rules for a proper Search Engine Optimization strategy (A good technical structure, with great unique content and patience are for me the keys of success).
@Garry Davis - It’s exactly the way Black hat (spammers) think: short > quick and rack as much money as possible. If I were Google that will be exactly the starting point I will use to counter spam.
Finally I think Google can’t deal efficiently with spam while they start using the user experience “devil’s” keyword to be able to sell more. Let’s think about it this way: If SERPs are poor ether I change of search engine (low chance now) or I may click on ads (bigger chance).
PS: please excuse my unperfected English, I m French
Head of SEO at Unique Digital
8:58PM on 8th January 2010
Thanks everyone for the comments.
I agree that black hat never went away but I think the point has been missed and this is a growing trend.
Google sponsor cloaking (A/B testing), and this trend has been increasing long before caffeine went live. Rather than a smattering we are now seeing a dominance of many search results.
Google may have recognised the cloaking but the listing still exists. Previously it would have been banned.
It is still indexing results on Vistaprint even though the bot view is different from the human view.
The adwords site still exists whereas before it would have been dropped.
All of these have been reported. Nothing has happened.
This shows a legitimising of black hat as acceptable practice. Before it was a risk. Now it seems they may have given up so we can all join in the fun.
Maybe the business risk no longer exists and black hat is now an acceptable practice?
8:51PM on 12th January 2010
I see loads of my competitors getting ranked high up there by using spammy and black hat techniques. Sometimes it gets picked up but more often it doesn't, leaving them to carry on their merry way. I'm sure at some stage it will come back to bite them but Google doesn't seem to have their policing algos in shape, very surprising for the "do no evil" team
Head of SEO at Unique Digital
8:57PM on 12th January 2010
@Moo out of interest, what are you seeing? Over the last few days Caffeine has allegedley been rolling out and I'm starting to see more rubbish in the SERPs.
11:49AM on 13th January 2010
Caffeine update has produced high rankings for a number of very old (6+ years) pages that I had completly forgotten about! Perhaps Caffiene incorporates some sort of roll back to previous algo?
Director at WhyCommunicate?
12:14PM on 13th January 2010
@Jean-michel de sousa This is my concern, black hat fuels black hat, if agencies employing these techniques are 'winning' then ultimately this will drag the others with them.
It is clear from the work we have completed that in a large number of businesses the board are not aware of the risks involved with this strategy / approach.
Its all well going out to deliberately run black hat and be aware of the risks, but what about those business who are not aware and end up with 'egg' on thier faces.
1:12AM on 14th January 2010
Great article. Daily people are profiting from these blackhat methods. Its not only on websites but they are used all over the internet. The reason so many people use it is basically because it works! Google need to implement more to stop it. People are using the likes of xrumer to build thousands of backlinks at a time to their website and many go unnoticed.
8:23PM on 22nd January 2010
The fundamental problem is that Google's business model requires web spam. When organic search works perfectly, taking the user to a site that gives or sells users what they want, Google makes no money. When search takes a user to an ad-laden site, or the ads displayed with a search result are more relevant than the organic search results, Google makes money.
At SiteTruth, we rate advertisers for legitimacy. The basic question our system asks is "can we find the real-world business behind this web site". We offer a Firefox plug-in which rates each Google ad that appears on the user's page, placing a rating icon atop each ad. As a result of this, we accumulate Google's customer list as our plugin contacts our servers. (We don't monitor user behavior, just advertiser behavior, which is more interesting.)
About 35-38% of Google advertisers, by domain, are what we call "bottom-feeders", sites with a commercial purpose but no identifiable business behind them. This reflects Google's rather low standards for advertisers.
It's sad. In the early days, Google tried not to be evil. Then, in 2006, they had a down quarter. That's when they turned to the dark side. They stopped sponsoring the Web Spam Summit and started sponsoring Search Engine Strategies. It's sad.
Managing Director at Inspiration Inc
11:48AM on 31st January 2010
Good article. For me a lot of what happens depends on your clients and the trust they place in you - if we are talking as an agency. Explaining why from a long-term and potential PR perspective why black-hat could be bad for business, is enough we usually find to convince clients to stay on what we all consider to be white-hat techniques.
Google is flawed but then aren't we all!
12:59PM on 8th September 2010
I think that you have to patient in dealing with Google and waiting for them to 'discover' the tactics being used by a particular website. Given time, Google will eventually find out that a website is using unscrupulous code and will ban them from the search results. Overall, I think that Google does a good job.
The problem I have is that there are many SEO's out there that claim to offer guaranteed results (usually by using black hat methods) that give us all a bad name. If everybody just played nice with Google, then we wouldn't have to worry about damaging the reputation of our industry.
10:03PM on 13th January 2011
It's even worse on the "Google Places" front. Google Places is easy to spam, and the penalties for spamming are low. Some previously "white hat" companies are spamming in a big way, adding phony business locations and fake recommendations.
(Our paper on this: "http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/placesspam10.pdf")
Just to show how blatant this has become, see this video from Musson Media:
'"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yHsI17fxAE"
Best viewed full-screen with the volume up, this is the most overproduced commercial for spam I've seen to date.
All this can be stopped (see our "http://www.sitetruth.com") but Google will have to take a much harder line than they've ever taken before.