January 23, 2007
It’s been just a couple of days since I had written about the possibility of SEDD and what a coincidence!
In my post I was talking about Bad Neghbourhood and precisely this happened to me - I looked at my backlinks on Technorati and it happened that some jerk decided that linking a dozen of spammy Blogs to my rather insignificant article on LinkieWinkie was a pretty good idea and all because this spammer (well, he or she is, whatever you may mean by this word) diggs into the subject of holidays and my unfortunate article seemed to rate good for this keyword.
Well, there are two sides to it. On one hand I gained In link popularity on Technorati, on the other hand it’s a bit hurting as it damages my online reputation. I really don’t want to be associated with this spam!
To counter the damage I simply had to register and link in a number of Blogs on the major bloghosting services like LiveJournal, Yahoo, Blogspot, Wordpress and so on. Now my new links cover this completely. Let’s see how it will affect my rankings now.
tags: bad neghbourhood, blogspot, lzzr, linkiewinkie, livejournal, sedd, wordpress, yahoo, backlinks on technorati, blogs, holidays, jerk, link popularity, online reputation, spam, spammer, spammy
Posted by LZZR under SEDD, Blog | Comments (0)
January 20, 2007
When you go through SEO FAQ pages or ask an average SEO guru or a Search Engine spokesperson if Search Engine Ranking of your site can be deliberately harmed by your competitor the answer is always short and definitive: NO, no site can be harmed this way. Work to improve your site and you will score, don’t think about your competition this way!
Some recent events demonstrate that the issue is not necessarily so black-and-white.
In a remarkable post last month titled How Google handles hacked sites Matt Cutts in a rather amateur PR (I mean Public Relationships in a very old-fashioned sense) exercise describes a story in which a popular website gets hacked and how Google handles this case. A predictable happy-end crowns the story and we can’t help applauding the gracious and the merciful power of the almighty Google.
It’s not that I am taking pleasure watching the chief Google PR officer having to apologize facing another popular uprising. Neither I am worried too much about petty little sites that usually deserve much less attention and much less forgiving from the merciful one. Incidentally this case provoked quite a slightly different line of thought.
The site in question is a well-known established resource never accused of any kind of spamming activities before. The punishment administered to the site seems far too severe - not just a penalty imposed on the the ranking but a complete exclusion. I quote:
the site was classified as hacked and spammy. We stopped showing it for user queries.
Evidently it was known to Google that the site was hacked most likely webmastes had nothing to do with it, apart from being slightly careless about the security issue. So, the site itself was only indirectly responsible for the event and only via a certain degree of negligence, the punishment however was administered to the fullest extent whilst the guilty party, the culprit went unpunished. Hackers in this case had no intention to harm SEPRs of the site, they were just hunting for incoming links to their doorways. The site itself fell victim of a crossfire whilst being just an innocent bystander. It is not so difficult though to imagine that some other hackers may have a completely opposite objective and try to use the same trick to exclude, albait temporarily the victim site from search engines. In most cases one does not even need to hack a victim website to inflict damage on SEPRs. Merely placing the victim into a Bad Neighbourhood might suffice.
I have no intention of publicising or even disclosing all possible tactics that might lead to eventual SED or even exclusion of a victim site - I really fear it might set a Genie out of the bottle. Suffice to say that any literate SEO practitioner with a bit of experience can quickly design a range of tactics deliberately designed to harm SEPRs of their competitors. I propose calling such tactics SEDD - Search Engine Deliberate Deranking (as opposed to SEO proper).
The Ostrich approach to the problem prevalent at the time of writing will help no more… Unless there will be clear guidelines regarding possible SEDD issued by the major serach engines, such practice may start snowballing and this spells a disaster for all of us. So there are some questions to be asked and perhaps answered by those known to speak on behalf of our Big Brothers (Google, Yahoo, MSN). Namely, how Search Engines will behave in hypothetical cases of SEDD and is there any guarantee that SEDD is not being practiced already?
terms SED (Search Engine Deranking) and SEDD (Search engine Deliberate Deranking) are copyright © LZZR.com 
tags: google, msn, sed, sedd, seo, sepr, yahoo, deranking, hacked, hacking, lzzr.com, tactics
Posted by LZZR under SEDD, SEO Ethics, Google | Comments (4)
January 7, 2007
Prefetch attribute had been around for some time but had some limited use as it was supported only in Firefox. Now with an explosive adoption of IE 7 that seems to support this attribute it can open some really good opportunities for not-so-whitehat SEO. If it does what it does uses for this wonderful feature may vary from rather exotic Alexa Cheat to affiliate links (cookie cutters) or a banal Google search spoofing like the following Motorola LZZR search.
There are however some repercussions one must remember about.
- Judging from the Google Webaccelerator FAQ Google itself must well be aware of the fact that the hit in question is not user-initiated from x-moz: prefetch HTTP header sent by Mozilla browsers (it is likely that IE is sending some identifiers in headers too).
- The page with a prefetch link is tracable via referrer header so the whole plot can easily be uncovered
At the same time until most interested parties adapt to this new attribute there is a window of opportunity for this trick especially if used in combination with Javascript and or server side scripting (PHP would be my choice).
tags: firefox, ie7, affiliate, alexa, attribute, cheat, cookie, google, header, lzzr, motorola, prefetch, seo, tag, trick, webaccelerator
Posted by LZZR under SEO Tricks | Comments (0)
