Pubcon: black SEO methods

Introduce you valuable material from the conference Pubcon, where Ziv Dascalu (founder of the WiseImpact Company) describes the methods of black SEO and how to protect them.

Note: this time we won’t discuss cloaking, doorways and other usual things. Ziv works for the WiseImpact Company and according to his words it presents SEO consulting services when problems come.

Let’s talk about competitive subject. Gambling, pharmacy, poker, credit, insurance – all these are different types of services. In these subjects there are no rules, there is a real war. To get top positions in search engines they do everything.

In war all means are good –so, we will focus our attention on it. Today we will play the bad guy.

Note: we won’t learn how to become a bad guy, it’s necessary just to know what this guy can do.

There is a time, when the best way to make a progress in search issuance – it’s eliminating competitor, that is higher than you.  When things go wrong, knowledge is a critical factor.  You can’t solve the problem if don’t know what is the matter.

How competitors can eliminate you in issuance

Note: don’t use these methods

If you can’t liquidate competitor’s site from issuance, destroy it. If you can’t destroy it – think about its hosting.

Links – incoming – old

Find out good links of your competitors and ask hosters redirect them to your site. If it doesn’t work – send a complaint to them. Write like this: “You refer to a bad site and if you don’t off the link then will be legally responsible.” You will be surprised when see that many sites will off links.

Links – incoming – new

Now, when you get rigid of old good competitor’s links it is time to change old links to new ones. Look for references exchange and ranges, banned and compromised sites, fake profiles with spam, spammed accounts in blogs, chat rooms, Twitter, fit even paid links, which surely must be reported to Google.

Actually there are a lot of messages about spam go to Google just from black SEO experts.

If you want Google count such references like a spam, try to set up Adsense on these spammed sites.

Then with these spammed sites place links to your competitor. Note: again, this is what your enemies do but not that you should do by yourselves.

XSS, hacking, introduction of widgets and code references from the comments and other areas. Use widgets of third parties carefully, be attentive that they do not set up links from your own sites.

You will be surprised to know how many skilled SEOs do not pay attention to out.php or go / to / url link types that can be manipulated.

 

Manipulation by content

Create on a competitor site duplicate content or help it to be indexed (it’s good we’ve just known how to protect it).

Is a competitor’s forum moderated? Spend a little time and post there a few "cognitive" articles. The same is for comments, feedback, etc. If you site has such sections, you have to moderate it. Just look for the 1-pixel fonts, DHTML-holes and cloaking, if allow users to upload HTML and scripts.

Get to know the site

Is it possible to get access to competitor’s robot.txt file for wrong server settings? Is there an opportunity to add such tags as noindex and nofollow? Also, don’t forget about XSS.

Remember: black SEOs can use your public information from WHOIS for sending spam from their domains.

Can you get an access to competitor webmaster panel or to his accounts in social networks? What about your colleagues? Are there enough qualified employees work in your company to not disclose such information? Several months ago it was easy to get such information using just several lines of HTML-core, but now vulnerability is covered.

External factors

DMC and TM are still good tools.

Do you own the domains *name of the company * in all areas? If not, then they can spam your competitors using your data WHOIS.

One more a big source of duplicate content can be proxy sites.

Google recently has introduced a new mechanism - the "freshness", use it. Please send large volumes of content via RSS feed and flow it to various aggregators of these tapes. So you probably will bypass static sites.

If you still are not on Google maps, then someone could tell it that your company is located somewhere in Africa.

Black PPC

If you have daily budget for contextual advertising, so someone can easy waste it, using the bot in early morning.

They also can use your code or ID of advertiser in any kind of questionable sites to create unnecessary problems for you instead of conversion.

Besides, with the help of some tools you can redirect visitors to competitor’s site without their agreement.

Criticism

• You can hire people who tell you everything about buying links by competitors.
• You can hire people who tell you how competitor’s site deceives search engines and always get away with their arms. And you will not have any relation to it. All of you will make thousands of bots from India or China.
• You can hire people who will always complain to spread of viruses.

Analytics

Sending false queries to competitor’s site you can complicate the work of their analytic department. Don’t forget about botnets.

Hacking

When nothing works, they might just crack.

• 302 hack still works
• Cloaking and redirect 301
• Cloaking and redirects via scripts - and then report about it in Google.
• Deterioration of DNS
• Cross-domain calls.

Human factor

Bribe SEOs of your competitor. Or distribute on behalf of him the summary and he can be hired by someone else. Or embed your person in a company of your competitor.

Denial of Service (DDOS)

Once I suffered a similar attack. But fortunately DDOS was at the domain level, not IP that is why I easily redirected it to a competitor. DDOS can damage all your sites on the server. Just once I lost the site when the FBI closed down the server for another site. Is not a bad tactic too!

That’s all! And now it’s time for questions and answers.

The main question: how resist DDOS?

Answer: Distribute the load, or do what I described above: redirect url, if the attack is at the domain level. If the attack is at the level of IP, you can change the IP. If the attack is from Russia (as happens in most cases), you can use geotargeting in IP settings and disable Russia.

Question: is there in your responsibilities in the company WiseImpact to find people who will use the methods described above for you?

Answer: no)), we implement preventive measures. Often the most effective way to combat this behavior is to identify the attacker and sending to him a person for an interview.